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Suso Saiz Mix

Theory Therapy · Theory Therapy 15: Suso Sáiz

Martina Verhoeven Solo Piano

 

A recent discovery as I was previewing music from last year. Piano I enjoy.

Best Music of the Year 2022- Paul Van Nevel

Paul Van Nevel's vocal ensemble has been either on my record player, CD player, or MP3 player for over35 years continuously. The selection of composers and specific compositions is enlightening, year after year. And the quality of the interpretations are always very high. This years album is a wonderful selection of early vocal music that I love. More, Paul.

From BBC Music:

Paul van Nevel has been recording medieval music since 1971. This, his latest project, seems to have two purposes: to give a potted account of the development of Franco-Flemish polyphony c1400-c1550, and to show how the landscape of the local areas from which the composers came is embodied in their music.

The earliest composer here is Johannes Hasprois, who died c1428. His ‘Ma douce amour’ is an intricate work and the resonant acoustic does not help the texture, nor does the slightly lax approach to rhythm. The group is more at home in later pieces such as l’Héritier’s motet ‘Locutus est Dominus’ (c1552) the clamorous sounds of which they bring to a captivating conclusion.

The landscape angle is slightly odd. We are not talking here about how the sounds of a landscape might be replicated (babbling brooks, birdsong etc), or its musical associations quoted (folksong etc), or even how a composer’s emotional attachment might be expressed. Rather (according to van Nevel) the landscape itself replicates ‘the spirit of its culture in a powerful way’. Hence Baston’s ‘Ung souvenir’ embodies ‘misty Artois’ (though the lines are sung with great clarity), Gombert’s ‘O malheureuse journée’ reflects the desolation of the Lele Valley (though it is performed rather stolidly), and Ockeghem’s Sanctus is actually modeled in part on a work by Dufay who grew up elsewhere. Luckily some real landscaping can be heard in Hesdin’s motet ‘Parasti’ where the performers shape the form and contour the dynamics splendidly.

 

From ALL Music:

The general trend in recordings of Renaissance polyphony has been toward typing music to specific surroundings: royal festivities, religious feast days, and the like. This collection by the Huelgas Ensemble goes in the other direction, providing three CDs' worth of music ranging from the medieval era to Anton Bruckner, with most of the pieces falling into some stretch of the High Renaissance. The music was recorded, beautifully, in a Romanesque church near Dijon in 2018, and the program is unified loosely by a set of general guidelines for the selections at that event: the music emphasized "unknown repertoire, undeservedly obscure composers, and experiments that fall outside the scope of the normal concert season." All of those factors are present here, with that undeservedly obscure composer Anonymous heading the list, and the ensemble makes a strong case for the large body of rarely performed Renaissance music that's out there. Listen to the gorgeous Lamentations of Jeremiah of José de Vaquedano at the end of the first disc, or the delicate but serious chanson Que null'étoile sur nous of Claude Le Jeune, otherwise known mostly for a few metrical chanson experiments that turn up in music history classes. Each piece is given a careful and often affecting performance by the veteran Huelgas Ensemble and director Paul van Nevel, and with the extraordinary sound, this release may be just the thing for listeners who want to luxuriate in some unfamiliar Renaissance music for a couple of hours.

From BBC Music:

The Huelgas-Ensemble and director Paul van Nevel celebrated its 35th birthday in 2005 with live concerts of some truly complex, multi-voiced polyphony…including the 40 part work, Ecce beatam lucem by Alessandro Striggio, which was the catalyst for a splendid piece of 40-part retaliation from Thomas Tallis: "Spem in alium", the best-known work here. The Huelgas-Ensemble has recorded both before for Sony, but heard live, these performances are less restrained, perhaps in a way that might not please the purists. But as the many polyphonic strands surround you – and here they do surround you, thanks to this hybrid SACD – you’d have to have a cold heart not to be caught up in the performances. The ingenuity of the composers is extraordinary; there’s one of the strangest and in its way most original works in the Eton Choirbook, by the late 15th century English composer Robert Wylkynson. His setting of "Jesus autem transiens" is a 13 part canon, with every voice moving within the same restricted vocal compass. And before it there’s a 24-voice setting of "Qui habitat" by Josquin in which the singers divide into four choirs, each with its own six-part canon. It has a hypnotic effect...and so does the work which opens the concert, a newly-commissioned piece by Willem Ceuleers (in 35 parts of course, one for each year), which had me fooled until some decidedly modern touches broke through the renaissance texture. It’s ingenious, but it does outstay its welcome, unlike every other work on this astonishing disc.

Best Music of the Year 2022- Marta Sanchez

 

I've always been captivated by Sanchez' music-her compositions, her piano style, and her talented groups. Her groups evolve and her music sinuous pathways elaborate melodies and rhythms I come to associate my on past. Her most recent work continues this fruitful trend into a land that begins to incorporate more solidly the New York roots that have begun to take hold.

From New York Times:

When Marta Sánchez’s mother died unexpectedly in late 2020, the pianist was at a loss. But Sánchez knew, almost instinctively, where she could process her grief: at the piano, pen and paper in hand, sounding out new music for her quintet.

In the decade since she moved to New York from Madrid, the quintet has been Sánchez’s main creative outlet. And since the release of its strong 2015 debut, “Partenika,” it has made itself known as one of the most consistently satisfying bands in contemporary jazz — largely thanks to the well-ordered complexity and openhearted energy of Sánchez’s tunes, which blur the divide between lead melody and accompaniment, steady pulse and unruly drift.

The group’s personnel rotates often, but the format has never shifted: a pair of saxophones out front, often in high contrast with one another; a bassist; a drummer; and the tension-raising technique of Sánchez’s piano.

As a composer, she culls a lot of her inspiration from life experience, and no matter how technical her music gets, it retains an unpretentious, poignant appeal. (On “Partenika” the deftly sculpted tunes often had prosaic names, like “Patella Dislocation” — yes, inspired by a knee injury Sánchez suffered — or simply “Yayyyy.”) So it’s no surprise that the quintet’s fourth album, “SAAM (Spanish American Art Museum),” is both musically complex and emotionally direct, managing to convey the raw, implacable pain of loss.

 

From Downbeat:

A fine pianist who is a particularly inventive arranger-composer, Marta Sanchez has led a quintet since 2015, one that has recorded four albums so far. A constant has been Roman Filiú who played alto on the other quintet recordings but for this project switches to tenor. Altoist Alex LoRe is a major asset, often sounding quite relaxed and laid-back even while improvising over the most dissonant backgrounds.

The opener, “The Unconquered Vulnerable Areas,” has a soothing theme before it builds in suspense and tension. LoRe shows that he can hit high notes with ease while Filiú has a stormy and stirring tradeoff with Sanchez.

“Dear Worthiness” is a thoughtful and dark piece about self-doubt that includes a fluent alto solo and some pretty expressive playing by the leader.

“SAAM” is filled with dissonance and the assertive drums of Allan Mednard, while the harmonized horns on the ballad “The Eternal Stillness” are memorable, as is arguably the best piano playing of the set.

“Marivi” was written as a message to Sanchez’s mother, whom she was not able to visit in Spain during her last days because of COVID-19 travel restrictions. The emotional piece features singer Camila Meza and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire as guests.

Of Sanchez’s other originals, “If You Could Create It” is relatively playful yet purposeful, Filiú and bassist Rashaan Carter star on a somber “The Hard Balance,” “December 11th” has a tango feel and a sparkling piano solo, and the closer “When Dreaming Is The Only” is highlighted by the interplay of the saxophonists.

From Jazz Trail:

The pianist/composer Marta Sanchez was born in Madrid and works in New York, where she has already demonstrated bold compositional skills with contemporary jazz pieces that adhere to form and structure. The quintet has been her preferred format since 2015, but on this new outing, SAAM (Spanish American Art Museum), she recycles the lineup with new musical partners. She maintains the Cuban saxophonist Roman Filiu in the frontline - here surprisingly playing tenor only - and welcomes Alex LoRe, whose blustery alto statements are an excellent match. The group is complemented by a zestful rhythm section in which Sanchez teams up with bassist Rashaan Carter and drummer Allan Mednard. 

As the title implies, this recording mixes elements of her Spanish and American experiences, but its central piece, “Marivi” - a tribute to Sanchez’s mother who passed during lockdown - falls outside the predominant mood as she abdicates from the saxophone players to feature the guest vocalist/guitarist Camila Meza, who sings in Spanish, and the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, who sails serenely with a mix of keening and brightness.

Most of the pieces have relatively short themes, and “The Unconquered Vulnerable Areas” ushers in a stimulating rhythmic drive, having the expeditious LoRe delivering gracious ideas. After that, there's a shared soloing moment in which Sanchez and Filiu articulate a nice musical conversation. Displaying more reflective tones are the following: “Dear Worthiness”, a ballad with a three time feel in direct relation to an onerous sense of insecurity; “The Eternal Stillness”, a pool of gorgeous effulgence; and “The Hard Balance”, a delicate chamber-like number with horn polyphony and polyrhythmic feel that spotlights the group’s atmospheric strengths. The latter two pieces feature bass improvisations.

Best Music of the Year 2022- Beth Orton

 

A slight revelation for me. Like a jazz album it evolves as the theme is repeated and refined as it progresses. The music changes like the weather but it is the same day. An incredibly capturing set of songs and Orton's voice with her grainy filter makes it just right. Lovely.

From Pop Matters:

Yet Weather Alive is a fascinating creature, one that belies easy categorization. Working with jazz drummer Tom Skinner and sax player Alabaster dePlume, Orton self-produced a record of deep atmosphere and warm tones; it sounds like morning fog receding from a beach aglow in the morning dawn. Its jazz players only give jazzy overtones to songs that don’t quite exist in the realm of folk or pop or rock. The eight tracks on Weather Alive sound like Beth Orton songs, which is a rare treat.

“I was so embarrassed to play these songs to people at first because I know how they are all just kind of strung together,” notes Orton during her interview with The Line of Best Fit. “I know that some of my processes in the editing were really rudimentary. I mean, it was mostly done in my shed.” While the album was born of several stops and false starts, it’s clear that all of Weather Alive‘s songs come from the same relaxed place, all rolling out at their own casual pace (which is why the record’s shortest number clocks in at just under 4:30).

Opening with the atmospheric title track, Orton’s voice is the first thing that jumps out of the mix. Unafraid to represent herself plainly, her ever-distinct pipes are lightly weathered now, a coarseness baked into her inflection with some tones even halting and stuttering. While her last album (the still-underrated electro experiment that was 2016’s Kidsticks) was awash in bedroom electro styles and sounds, her voice was often run through filters and echoes, which makes her so bluntly showing the state of her vocals on Weather Alive that much more pointed. Orton is not hiding behind studio tricks this time out: she’s emotionally naked at every turn. “It was just excruciating to listen to in front of other people,” she says during that Line of Best Fit interview. “Every bit of it was personal and exposing.”

From The Line of Best Fit:

On her eighth and newest album, Weather Alive, Orton sounds freer and more comfortable than she has at any other point in her career. Inspired by a soot-filled, second-hand piano - and aided by the newfound freetime Orton had while her children were in school - it is a warm, immersive LP whose wisdom unfolds gradually over repeat listens. It is her first self-produced album and, through no coincidence, happens to be far and away her best.

The title track is the album’s most definitive statement - a transcendent, percussive, 7+ minute epic grounded by Orton’s cracked, aching voice. Backed up by a full band, Orton’s musings on the everyday beauty of nature take on otherworldly significance. Towards the song’s end, Orton repeats the words “coming alive” almost half-a-dozen times, her voice gradually becoming buried under the song’s sublime arrangements; almost mirroring the feeling of going outside on a wet and windy day and feeling overcome by the elements.

Weather Alive isn’t just Orton’s best album, it’s also one that could have only come at this juncture in her life - as she nears the 26th anniversary of her breakthrough Trailer Park. There’s so much wisdom to be had listening to Orton’s eighth LP. On it, she alternates between mystifying poetry that evokes the bewilderment of the late David Berman’s lyricism (“Thought about living with nothing to lose / With windows to see them before they see you”) and straightforward confessionals and dialogue (“Why I feel like shit for what I didn’t do wrong?”). On “Haunted Satellite”, Orton pens the album’s most incisive line, in the form of a rich, evocative metaphor that speaks to the sense of displacement that swirls throughout Weather Alive (“I have lived as a satellite / I’ve saddled up, I’ve settled up, I don’t sit right”).

Never before have we been gifted with such multidimensional songwriting from Orton. Her parents - who both died when she was a teen - are given voice on the hauntingly desolate “Lonely”. After listing all the reasons she’s supposedly unloveable (“I’m a whore / I’m too exposed”), Orton repeats the titular word a devastating fifteen times - conjuring up all the horror and isolation of grief in the process. The following “Arms Around a Memory”, by contrast, is perhaps the loveliest song Orton has ever recorded. ”Didn’t we make a beautiful life / In your eighth floor walk-up that night”, she declares. Like PJ Harvey’s “You Said Something”, it captures the magic of love’s most intense moments - how it puts the rest of the world on pause and makes even the least remarkable of settings glow. Yet, rather than succumb wholly to nostalgia, Orton reflects with the benefit of hindsight - dissecting both the faulty nature of memories, as well as their ability to immortalise the purest moments of our lives. Here, the song gains real bite, as she snaps back at the song’s other protagonist: “And I've come to questioning my credibility / Like you’re the reliable witness to what I feel”, she snarls.

 

From Uncut:

Stormy psychic and physical weather buffeted Beth Orton as she made this record. When long-standing health issues were correctly diagnosed and medicated in 2014, the ground perversely shifted beneath her feet. Meanwhile, 2016 saw the release of Kidsticks, the most electronic album of a career which has eased between her pioneering ’90s folktronica’s polar extremes. But as this personal flux continued, the organic sound of a battered, stand-up piano in her garden shed became her anchor. Playing this unfamiliar instrument recalled picking up a guitar to write songs in the ’90s, returning Orton to first principles.

Relying on simple, modal patterns, she then began to sculpt homemade soundscapes using her midi setup. In the process, vivid memories rose up, ranging from old affairs in New York to the loss of her friend Andy Weatherall, becoming the nascent album’s flickering heart. “I kept reliving these fragments of past lives,” Orton recalls, “and putting them in music was like putting them in amber. A moment would be there like light on a wall, it didn’t hang around long, and I’d write around that.” These sensual visions were then rigorously honed into songs, as Orton tested if “something so fallible and amorphous” could hold compositional weight.

Eventually, Orton invited The Smile and Sons Of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner to add to her homemade palette. He was joined by other often jazz-minded collaborators, such as the ecstatic poet-saxophonist Alabaster dePlume, suiting Orton’s fascination with Alice Coltrane’s spiritual jazz, alongside ambient vistas from Talk Talk to Springsteen’s stark Nebraska. Thrown further back on her own resources by lockdown, Orton self-produced Weather Alive, a project which began with her identity in crisis ending as her most personal statement.

Best Music of the Year 2022- Ambarchi, Berthlin, Werliin

 

An impressive groove filled with flavor and agility. And this wasn't the only album for Ambarchi this year this prolific and creative musician makes a lot of music and I'm surprised it took me this long to realize it.

From Pitchfork:

On Ghosted, the groove reigns supreme. Recorded live at Stockholm’s Studio Rymden in late 2018, the album showcases a carefully stripped-down sound. Berthling plays acoustic double bass on all but the second track, where he opts for electric. Werliin favors a palette of shakers, toms, and glancing snares, sketching out the contours of the beat by tracing its crags and cavities. And while the timbre of Ambarchi’s guitar couldn’t be mistaken for any other instrument, he typically avoids strummed chords or picked melodic lines in favor of a wash of tone run through a Leslie cabinet. The three players fill this wide-open sound with ephemeral shapes that hint at a possible meaning behind the album’s title: The music swims with darting shapes, flickering traces of energy, that feel almost supernatural in origin.

Ghosted consists of just four tracks: three long, extended vamps and one atmospheric coda. The trio is joined on the first, “I,” by Christer Bothén, a Swedish multi-instrumentalist who collaborated with Don Cherry in the 1970s. Here, as on recordings like Cherry’s 1974 album Eternal Now, he plays donso n’goni, a lute-like West African instrument that pairs with Berthling’s bright plucking to create a sound that’s warm and luminous. It’s the most joyful and easygoing of the album’s four tracks, with a shuffling, circular groove and a loping two-note bassline that evoke the feel of a desert road arrowing endlessly toward the horizon. In tone and mood alike, it’s faintly reminiscent of Joshua Abrams and his group Natural Information Society, where the guimbri—a North African descendent of the n’goni—plays a similarly hypnotic role.

From Soundohm:

It was early in 2019 — no, November 2018! — that Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin met at Studio Rymden, in a quiet suburban district of Stockholm, to make the music that became Ghosted.

Rooting in the rich tonality and repeating figures of Johan’s acoustic (and sometimes electric) bass, the four tracks that make up Ghosted unspool themselves with the terse flow of krautrock jams — percussive riffs and repetitions that build continuously, with subtle shifts rippling across the stereo spectrum, captured in minute detail. Oren’s guitar sounds organ-like, with notes of fire and glass wafting over the percolation and permutation of Johan and Andreas’ rhythms, patiently evolving variations within a minimal framework.

On the first single, "II", Berthling’s chiming bass harmonics form the pattern and the pocket, Werliin’s kitwork explores the nuances within the groove, locating a thousand new accents within the time, and Ambarchi floats dreamily about, with keening, chittering signals that register both in and out of lead-instrument designation – both ambient and psychedelic. Transformative jams!

 

From The Quietus:

I’m walking with my headphones on. It’s not the best context to hear this music but needs must. What starts with a twinkly loop rapidly escalates. Andreas Werliin’s drums swirl while Johan Berthling’s bass hovers across the beat. Oren Ambarchi’s guitar shimmers ominously in the background, sounding like a fried Hammond organ rather than six strings. My stride quickens even though the bpm of ‘II’, the second track on the trio’s new album Ghosted, doesn’t. The music reaches towards an ever deferred crescendo. As my pace accelerates, I lose awareness of my surroundings. Ambarchi’s guitar suddenly snaps into focus. It rises into a squeal. The intensity ascends. And then… Nothing.

I’m back to reality with almost violent effect. The track wasn’t meant to stop. Something’s gone wrong and my ancient mp3 player has reset itself. An accident that brings into clarity that this album needs to play uninterrupted to really do its magic. The trio explore the relationship between repetition and difference that’s long been a fascination in exploratory music, creating something that, disorientatingly, sounds equal parts quantized and free-flowing.

The outline of a motorik pulse drives the first two tracks, but Ambarchi, Berthling and Werliin unearth colourful fluctuations from rigid rhythms. As if they’re teasing at just how much they can shuffle within a precariously balanced structure before knocking it over. There’s hints of TNT-era Tortoise throughout as repetitive phrases dance through jazzy variation. But the trio feel more interested in embracing rather than relieving tension. The tracks come across like sonic Rubik’s cubes, exploring the possible permutations of a confined structure.

 

Bill Evans Soundcheck!

Steph · BILL EVANS - DECOUVERTE DU PIANO A CARDIN

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.