The Wire's Releases of the Year 2020

‘Workaround’ is the lucidly playful and ambitious solo debut album by rhythm-obsessive musician and DJ, Beatrice Dillon for PAN. It combines her love of UK club music’s syncopated suss and Afro-Caribbean influences with a gamely experimental approach to modern composition and stylistic fusion, using inventive sampling and luminous mixing techniques adapted from modern pop to express fresh ideas about groove-driven music and perpetuate its form with timeless, future-proofed clarity. Recorded over 2017-19 between studios in London, Berlin and New York, ‘Workaround’ renders a hypnotic series of polymetric permutations at a fixed 150bpm tempo. Mixing meticulous FM synthesis and harmonics with crisply edited acoustic samples from a wide range of guests including UK Bhangra pioneer Kuljit Bhamra (tabla); Pharoah Sanders Band’s Jonny Lam (pedal steel guitar); techno innovators Laurel Halo (synth/vocal) and Batu (samples); Senegalese Griot Kadialy Kouyaté (Kora), Hemlock’s Untold and new music specialist Lucy Railton (cello); amongst others, Dillon deftly absorbs their distinct instrumental colours and melody into 14 bright and spacious computerised frameworks that suggest immersive, nuanced options for dancers, DJs and domestic play. ‘Workaround’ evolves Dillon’s notions in a coolly unfolding manner that speaks directly to the album’s literary and visual inspirations, ranging from James P. Carse’s book ‘Finite And Infinite Games’ to the abstract drawings of Tomma Abts or Jorinde Voigt as well as painter Bridget Riley’s essays on grids and colour. Operating inside this rooted but mutable theoretical wireframe, Dillon’s ideas come to life as interrelated, efficient patterns in a self-sufficient system. With a naturally fractal-not-fractional logic, Dillon’s rhythms unfold between unresolved 5/4 tresillo patterns, complex tabla strokes and spark-jumping tics in a fluid, tactile dance of dynamic contrasts between strong/light, sudden/restrained, and bound/free made in reference to the notational instructions of choreographer Rudolf Laban. Working in and around the beat and philosophy, the album’s freehand physics contract and expand between the lissom rolls of Bhamra’s tabla in the first, to a harmonious balance of hard drum angles and swooping FM synth cadence featuring additional synth and vocal from Laurel Halo in ‘Workaround Two’, while the extruded strings of Lucy Railton create a sublime tension at the album’s palatecleansing denouement, triggering a scintillating run of technoid pieces that riff on the kind of swung physics found in Artwork’s seminal ‘Basic G’, or Rian Treanor’s disruptive flux with a singularly tight yet loose motion and infectious joy. Crucially, the album sees Dillon focus on dub music’s pliable emptiness, rather than the moody dematerialisation of reverb and echo. The substance of her music is rematerialised in supple, concise emotional curves and soberly freed to enact its ideas in balletic plies, rugged parries and sweeping, capoeira-like floor action. Applying deeply canny insight drawn from her years of practice as sound designer, musician and hugely knowledgable/intuitive DJ, ‘Workaround’ can be heard as Dillon’s ingenious solution or key to unlocking to perceptions of stiffness, darkness or grid-locked rigidity in electronic music. And as such it speaks to an ideal of rhythm-based and experimental music ranging from the hypnotic senegalese mbalax of Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force, through SND and, more currently, the hard drum torque of DJ Plead; to adroitly exert the sensation of weightlessness and freedom in the dance and personal headspace.

On his first LP of original songs in nearly a decade—and his first since reluctantly accepting Nobel Prize honors in 2016—Bob Dylan takes a long look back. *Rough and Rowdy Ways* is a hot bath of American sound and historical memory, the 79-year-old singer-songwriter reflecting on where we’ve been, how we got here, and how much time he has left. There are temperamental blues (“False Prophet,” “Crossing the Rubicon”) and gentle hymns (“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”), rollicking farewells (“Goodbye Jimmy Reed”) and heady exchanges with the Grim Reaper (“Black Rider”). It reads like memoir, but you know he’d claim it’s fiction. And yet, maybe it’s the timing—coming out in June 2020 amidst the throes of a pandemic and a social uprising that bears echoes of the 1960s—or his age, but Dylan’s every line here does have the added charge of what feels like a final word, like some ancient wisdom worth decoding and preserving before it’s too late. “Mother of Muses” invokes Elvis and MLK, Dylan claiming, “I’ve already outlived my life by far.” On the 16-minute masterstroke and stand-alone single “Murder Most Foul,” he draws Nazca Lines around the 1963 assassination of JFK—the death of a president, a symbol, an era, and something more difficult to define. It’s “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” that lingers longest, though: Over nine minutes of accordion and electric guitar mingling like light on calm waters, Dylan tells the story of an outlaw cycling through radio stations as he makes his way to the end of U.S. Route 1, the end of the road. “Key West is the place to be, if you’re looking for your mortality,” he says, in a growl that gives way to a croon. “Key West is paradise divine.”

Martin Khanja (aka Lord Spike Heart) and Sam Karugu emerge from Nairobi's flourishing underground metal scene as former members of the bands Lust of a Dying Breed and Seeds of Datura. Together in 2019 they formed Duma (Darkness in Kikuyu) with Sam abandoning bass for production and guitars and Lord Spike Heart providing extreme vocals to the project. Recorded at Nyege Nyege Studios in Kampala over three months in mid 2019 their self-titled debut album fuses the frenetic euphoria, unrelenting physicality and rebellious attitude of hardcore punk and trash metal with bone-crunching breakcore and raw, nihilist industrial noise through a claustrophobic vortex of visceral screams. The savant mix of brutally adrenalized drums, caustic industrial trap, shredding grindcore inspired guitars and abrupt speed changes create a darkly atmospheric menace and is lethal on tracks like the opener "Angels and Abysses" , "Omni" or "Uganda with Sam". The gruelling slow techno dirges and monolithic vocals on "Pembe 666" or "Sin Nature" add a pinch of dramatic inevitability bringing a new sense of theatricality and terrifying fate awaiting into the record's progression. A sinister sonic aggression of feral intensity with disregard for styles, Duma promises to impact the burgeoning African metal scene moving it into totally new, boundary-challenging experimental territories. VIDEO FOR LIONS BLOOD HERE: youtu.be/zd35MhHqjhc VIDEO FOR OMNI HERE: youtu.be/ffxLsl8MWXE

“My music is not as collaborative as it’s been in the past,” Jeff Parker tells Apple Music. “I’m not inviting other people to write with me. I’m more interested in how people\'s instrumental voices can fit into the ideas I’m working on.” As his career has evolved, the jazz guitarist and member of post-rock band Tortoise has become more comfortable writing compositions as a solitary exercise. While 2016\'s *The New Breed* featured a host of contributors, *Suite for Max Brown* finds the Los Angeles-based player eager to move away from the delirious funk-jazz of earlier works and towards something more unified and focused on repetition and droning harmonies. “I used to ask my collaborators to bring as much of the songwriting to the compositions as I do. Now, I’m just trying to prove to myself that I can do it on my own.” Parker handles most of the instruments on *Max Brown*, but familiar faces pop up throughout. The opening track, “Build a Nest,” features vocals from Parker’s daughter, Ruby, and “Gnarciss” includes performances from Makaya McCraven on the drums, Rob Mazurek on trumpet, and Josh Johnson on alto saxophone. Other frequenters of Parker’s orbit, like drummer Jamire Williams, appear throughout. But *Max Brown* is Parker’s record first and foremost, and the LP finds him less willing to give in to jazz’s typical demands of dynamic improvisation and community-oriented song-building. Here, Parker asserts himself as an ecstatic solo voice, where on earlier albums the soft-spoken musician may have been more willing to give way to his fellow bandmates. *Suite for Max Brown* is an ambitious sonic experiment that succeeds in its moves both big and small. “I like when music is able to enhance the environment of everyday life,” Parker says. “I would like people to be able to find themselves within the music.” Above all, *Suite for Max Brown* pays homage to the most important figures in Parker’s life. *The New Breed*, which was finished shortly after Parker’s father passed away, took its title from a store his father owned; *Max Brown* is derived from his mother’s nickname, and Parker felt an urgent desire to honor her while she was still able to hear it. “My mother has always been really supportive and super proud of the work I’ve done,” he says. “I wanted to dedicate an album to her while she’s still alive to see the results. She loves it, which means so much.” It’s an ode to his mother’s ambition, and a record that stands in awe of her achievements, even though they’re quite different from Jeff’s. “She had a stable job and collected a 401(k). My career as a musician is 180 degrees the opposite of that, but I’m still inspired by her work ethic.”

“I’m always looking for ways to be surprised,” says composer and multi-instrumentalist Jeff Parker as he explains the process, and the thinking, behind his new album, Suite for Max Brown, released via a new partnership between the Chicago–based label International Anthem and Nonesuch Records. “If I sit down at the piano or with my guitar, with staff paper and a pencil, I’m eventually going to fall into writing patterns, into things I already know. So, when I make music, that’s what I’m trying to get away from—the things that I know.” Parker himself is known to many fans as the longtime guitarist for the Chicago–based quintet Tortoise, one of the most critically revered, sonically adventurous groups to emerge from the American indie scene of the early nineties. The band’s often hypnotic, largely instrumental sound eludes easy definition, drawing freely from rock, jazz, electronic, and avant-garde music, and it has garnered a large following over the course of nearly thirty years. Aside from recording and touring with Tortoise, Parker has worked as a side man with many jazz greats, including Nonesuch labelmate Joshua Redman on his 2005 Momentum album; as a studio collaborator with other composer-musicians, including Makaya McCraven, Brian Blade, Meshell N’Degeocello, his longtime friend (and Chicago Underground ensemble co-founder) Rob Mazurek; and as a solo artist. Suite for Max Brown is informally a companion piece to The New Breed, Parker’s 2016 album on International Anthem, which London’s Observer honored as the best jazz album of the year, declaring that “no other musician in the modern era has moved so seamlessly between rock and jazz like Jeff Parker. As guitarist for Chicago post-rock icons Tortoise, he’s taken the group in new and challenging directions that have kept them at the forefront of pop creativity for the last twenty years. As of late, however, Parker has established himself as one of the most formidable solo talents in modern jazz.” Though Parker collaborates with a coterie of musicians under the group name The New Breed, theirs is by no means a conventional “band” relationship. Parker is very much a solo artist on Suite for Max Brown. He constructs a digital bed of beats and samples; lays down tracks of his own on guitar, keyboards, bass, percussion, and occasionally voice; then invites his musician friends to play and improvise over his melodies. But unlike a traditional jazz session, Parker doesn’t assemble a full combo in the studio for a day or two of live takes. His accompanists are often working alone with Parker, reacting to what Parker has provided them, and then Parker uses those individual parts to layer and assemble into his final tracks. The process may be relatively solitary and cerebral, but the results feel like in-the-moment jams—warm-hearted, human, alive. Suite for Max Brown brims with personality, boasting the rhythmic flow of hip hop and the soulful swing of jazz. “In my own music I’ve always sought to deal with the intersection of improvisation and the digital era of making music, trying to merge these disparate elements into something cohesive,” Parker explains. “I became obsessed maybe ten or fifteen years ago with making music from samples. At first it was more an exercise in learning how to sample and edit audio. I was a big hip-hop fan all my life, but I never delved into the technical aspects of making that music. To keep myself busy, I started to sample music from my own library of recordings, to chop them up, make loops and beats. I would do it in my spare time. I could do it when I was on tour—in the van or on an airplane, at a soundcheck, whenever I had spare time I was working on this stuff. After a while, as you can imagine, I had hours and hours of samples I had made and I hadn’t really done anything with them “So I made The New Breed based off these old sample-based compositions and mixed them with improvising,” he continues. “There was a lot of editing, a lot of post-production work that went into that. That’s in a nutshell how I make a lot of my music; it’s a combination of sampling, editing, retriggering audio, and recording it, moving it around and trying to make it into something cohesive—and make it music that someone would enjoy listening to. With Max Brown, it’s evolved. I played a lot of the music myself. It’s me playing as many of the instruments as I could. I engineered most it myself at home or during a residency I did at the Headlands Center for the Arts [in Sausalito, California] about a year ago.” His New Breed band-mates and fellow travelers on Max Brown include pianist-saxophonist Josh Johnson; bassist Paul Bryan, who co-produced and mixed the album with Parker; piccolo trumpet player Rob Mazurek, his frequent duo partner; trumpeter Nate Walcott, a veteran of Conor Oberst’s Bright Eyes; drummers Jamire Williams, Makaya McCraven, and Jay Bellerose, Parker’s Berklee School of Music classmate; cellist Katinka Klejin of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; and even his seventeen-year-old daughter Ruby Parker, a student at the Chicago High School of the Arts, who contributes vocals to opening track, “Build A Nest.” Ruby’s presence at the start is fitting, since Suite for Max Brown is a kind of family affair: “That’s my mother’s maiden name. Maxine Brown. Everybody calls her Max. I decided to call it Suite for Max Brown. The New Breed became a kind of tribute to my father because he passed away while I was making the album. The New Breed was a clothing store he owned when I was a kid, a store in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where I was born. I thought it would be nice this time to dedicate something to my mom while she’s still here to see it. I wish that my father could have been around to hear the tribute that I made for him. The picture on the cover of Max Brown is of my mom when she was nineteen.” There is a multi-generational vibe to the music too, as Parker balances his contemporary digital explorations with excursions into older jazz. Along with original compositions, Parker includes “Gnarciss,” an interpretation of Joe Henderson’s “Black Narcissus” and John Coltrane’s “After the Rain” (from his 1963 Impressions album). Parker recalls, “I was drawn to jazz music as a kid. That was the first music that really resonated with me once I got heavily into music. When I was nine or ten years old, I immediately gravitated to jazz because there were so many unexpected things. Jazz led me into improvising, which led me into experimenting in a general way, into an experimental process of making music.” Coltrane is a touchstone in Parker’s musical evolution. In fact, Parker recalls, he inadvertently found himself on a new musical path one night about fifteen years ago when he was deejaying at a Chicago bar and playing ‘Trane: “I used to deejay a lot when I lived in Chicago. This was before Serrato and people deejaying with computers. I had two records on two turntables and a mixer. I was spinning records one night and for about ten minutes I was able to perfectly synch up a Nobukazu Takemura record with the first movement of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and it had this free jazz, abstract jazz thing going on with a sequenced beat underneath. It sounded so good. That’s what I’m trying to do with Max Brown. It’s got a sequenced beat and there are musicians improvising on top or beneath the sequenced drum pattern. That’s what I was going for. Man vs machine. “It’s a lot of experimenting, a lot of trial and error,” he admits. “I like to pursue situations that take me outside myself, where the things I come up with are things I didn’t really know I could do. I always look at this process as patchwork quilting. You take this stuff and stitch it together until a tapestry forms.” —Michael Hill

Still House Plants present their second LP FAST EDIT. Cultivated over the course of 2019, the album switches the combativeness of previous releases for bare intimacy. FAST EDIT is a palette of qualities and curdled headspaces. Now living far apart and coming together only for intense periods of shows and touring, the band have come to rely on an archive of mp3s (quick recall overtakes stable long term memory). Written on mobile phones, dictaphones, and laptops, FAST EDIT cuts rehearsals and schemas with tight, raucous tracks. This is most tenderly at play on ‘Shy Song’ – a cut'n’chase piece, in which all sounds are ghosts of another. ‘PredikateD’ is a phone on the ground: the voice is air, the guitar and drums meld with the plywood and sand-bag structure, the seams exposed. The taste of the record is captured in an intervention written for the cancelled 2020 edition of Glasgow’s Counterflows Festival by Frances Morgan: ‘How do you think we should do this? The song does something different now, puts the other foot forward. How do you know when it’s done? End on a verb and it becomes a command: run! Towards the next thing. Do – towards the next thing to be done.’ For North and South America and Asia, please order via blankformseditions.bandcamp.com/album/fast-edit

“While you live, shine” Epigraph of Seikilos - 1st or 2nd century AD For my sins, I spent many years teaching the history of Western music to undergraduate students. I taught the “grand tour” - two millennia of music history crammed into three terms. The party line in the textbooks I was required to teach from was clear - after a brief detour to Ancient Greece, Western music unfolded from the voice, evolving with logic and clarity, from plainchant to organum and the motet, polyphonic counterpoint and beyond, successive genres building on and fractally expanding what came before. Dadabots, the duo of machine learning specialists CJ Carr and Zack Zukowkski, trained their neural network Sample-RNN on hours of a cappella recordings of my voice, producing 841 files over 40 generations of training. When CJ and Zack sent me the files, I was struck deeply by how it felt to listen to the network learning - the early files consisting of long notes and glitchy errors gradually giving way to moments of bizarre melody, whistles and washes of white noise before the sound of my own voice began to emerge. I was struck by the parallels with the party line of my music history days. 40 generations of my voice; 40 human generations living and dying over the 1200 years of music history we covered in the first term.  In A Late Anthology, I map the development of the network’s understanding of my voice onto the history of early Western music. Machine learning is used as a filter to listen to the history of early Western music; Western music history is used as a filter to listen to machine learning. In combination, they produce a new alternative tradition, a proposal for a different way of thinking about, listening to and making a history of Western music. 

White Boy Scream is the experimental classical project from opera singer and composer Micaela Tobin. On her latest release, 'BAKUNAWA', she dissects her voice through the use of electronics as a means of exploring identity and ancestral trauma. “BAKUNAWA” is an homage to the pre-colonial mythology of her motherland, the Philippines. Part sonic ritual, part diasporic storytelling. Micaela Tobin is currently on Faculty as a Voice Instructor at the California Institute for the Arts. She most recently performed a principal role in the critically acclaimed experimental opera, Sweet Land (comp. Raven Chacon & Du Yun), which made it’s U.S. premiere in March 2020. Her previous album, 'Remains' was listed as one of the top 10 Noise/Industrial Albums of 2018 by The Wire Magazine.

Over the past several years, the recorded output of Carl Stone has been turned on its head. In previous decades, Stone perennially toured new work but kept a harboring gulf of time between the live performances and their recorded release. This not only reflected the careful consideration of the pieces and technical innovations that went into the music but also the largely academic-minded audience that was themselves invested in the history and context of the work. The time span of Stone's recorded output in both sheer musical duration and year range was generously expansive. Following multiple historical overviews of Stone's work on Unseen Worlds and a re-connection with a wider audience, the time between Stone's new work in concert and on record has grown shorter and shorter until there is now almost no distance at all. Stone's work has often at its core explored new potential within popular cultural musics, simultaneously unspooling and satisfying a pop craving. On Stolen Car, the forms of Carl Stone's pieces have also become more compact, making for a progressive new stage in Stone's career where he is not only creating out of pop forms but challenging them. Stolen Car is the gleeful, heart racing sound of hijack, hotwire, and escape. Stone carries the easy smirk and confidence of a car thief just out of the can, a magician in a new town setting up a game of balls and cups. With each track he reaches under the steering wheel and yanks a fistful of wires. Boom, the engine roars to life, the car speeds off into the sunset, the cups are tipped over, the balls, like the car, are gone. "These tracks were all made in late 2019 and 2020, much of when I was in pandemic isolation about 5000 miles from my home base of Tokyo. All are made using my favorite programming language MAX. However distinct these two groupings might be they share some common and long-held musical concerns. I seek to explore the inner workings of the music we listen to using techniques of magnification, dissection, granulation,, anagramization, and others. I like to hijack the surface values of commercial music and re-purpose them offer a newer, different meaning, via irony and subversion." - Carl Stone, Los Angeles, September 2020

This album is about my version of forgiveness and things that I need to face in order to reach my version of that

Retreat to the forest where the moon don’t shine And the sun barely sweeps the floor ELUCID Shrines is the new album from Armand Hammer—ELUCID and billy woods—their first since 2018’s AOTY Paraffin. As ever, this release finds the duo treading fresh ground; swimming through rogue rhythms, rhymes skating over the abyss. Fourteen songs. A hundred glassine envelopes in a shoebox. A thousand stops on the train. Fire is stolen, not given. Shrines features contributions from Quelle Chris, Moor Mother, Earl Sweatshirt, Navy Blu, Andrew Broder, Fielded, Messiah Muzik, August Fanon, KeiyaA, Kenny Segal, Nicholas Craven, Akai Solo, Curly Castro, Pink Siifu, Steel Tipped Dove, Fat Albert Einstein, Nosaj and R.A.P. Ferreira.

BLQLYTE is the debut LP by Zeroh on Leaving Records. From its opening whisper of "culture is a baby" followed by a euphoric but frightening blast of sound, BLQLYTE moves with the unpredictable energy of a psychedelic trip, where apocalyptic soundscapes and mutated R&B vault between shamanistic musings on mortality and earthly matters of modern day Los Angeles. The mood is heavy, hanging in the air like rising waters building to a catastrophic flood. Zeroh's ninja like voice seamlessly transforms throughout tracks like a Greek chorus, tackling speeding thoughts and introspections in a stream of consciousness cascade of vocal flows and techniques that are both wordy and soulful. Perhaps classifiable as a rap album, BLQLYTE inhabits its own experimental, deeply personal zone in the orbit of Leaving Records' genre free ethos.  The album, created over a period of six years, highlights a story of Zeroh's growth. He says that during this period, "it was like something happened to me and it shook me up, and then it woke me up, and I kind of started to come to." He's aided by FR/BLCK/PR on "Metacine," a hypnagogic tour de force encapsulating BLQLYTE's intricate, anagogic aesthetic. FR/BLCK/PR's Regan Farquhar unleashes a devastating spoken word piece in a trippy, intensely hallucinogenic collaboration that also highlight's Zeroh's unique and exciting voice behind the boards. Zeroh's BLQLYTE plays on the contradictions and duality of life, an examination of the silver linings and beautiful traumas that can alter our understanding and perception of reality.

Free guitar for the new age: improv with intention, construction and destruction, all with the grain and air of performance captured and telescoped in a sonic particle collider. Makes sense, and not just because of the chaotic times. With Both, terminal collaborator Bill Nace (Body/Head, Thurston Moore) has found a stimulating, chiaroscuro-stubbled path back to the electric guitar's anarchic promise, drawn through eight colorful pieces that are equal parts sound, noise and music.

Where William Basinski’s 2019 album, *On Time Out of Time*, wrung ethereal drones out of data captured from the collision of two black holes, his 2020 follow-up returns to a more personal scale. Like his masterpiece *The Disintegration Loops*, *Lamentations* represents a journey into the Los Angeles ambient composer’s collection of tapes gathered over the years, in which loops of strings, voice, or unknown sounds have been slowed and stretched into eerie, wraithlike formations. Some of the source material reportedly dates back as far as 1979, but it sounds positively timeless, conjuring aching melancholy out of ghostly wisps of choir and orchestra. In “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” church bells are smeared into a deep, coppery drone; “The Wheel of Fortune” swirls orchestral snippets into uneasy patterns hanging just on the cusp of dissonance. Originally created for Robert Wilson’s opera *The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic*, “O, My Daughter, O, My Sorrow” sets a haunting scrap of Balkan folk song against a lulling backdrop of strings, suggesting an apparition rising from a watery grave. But even the most abstract pieces carry a heavy emotional punch: “Silent Spring” is little more than a shadow of an echo, but it beckons powerfully toward the abyss.

I / For Roy Stephens. “Doeth yw ymadrawdd hawdd hoyw Y delyn o rawn duloyw.” “Wise is the easy lively expression of the harp of shining black horsehair.” Iolo Goch (14eg ganrif / 14th century)

Arriving in June 2020, into a world locked down by pandemic but rising up in anti-racist demonstrations, Special Interest’s second album reflects the turbulence of the age. Cloaked in the New Orleans band’s frenetic, galvanizing fusion of punk, glam, No Wave, and electronic, these songs examine injustice, violence, obsession, and change with honesty and wit. They’re stories of defiance and hope, expressions of autonomy and solidarity, a love song for a city and, as the four-piece’s Alli Logout tells Apple Music, “a love song from hell.” “There were a lot of feelings to sit with and unpack,” says the singer, guiding us through the album track by track. **Drama** “What can I say? We love drama. Often when we play this live, we loop a vocal sample from \[Club 69’s ‘Drama’\] over the beat that says, ‘My life is a drama, with a beginning, a middle, and no end...’” **Disco III** “From the first time we jammed it out in practice, we knew it had to be the third installment of our Disco Trilogy. The first ‘Disco’ \[from 2018’s *Spiraling* album\] was critiquing cis gay dude culture’s cliché complacency. ‘Disco II’ \[also from *Spiraling*\] is a beautiful anthem about that feeling of being free in your body despite the world around you. For ‘Disco III,’ the pulsating nature of the beat deeply threw me into that moment where you and the girls are going to carry by any means necessary. For the verses, I went out and decided to describe everything that was going on in our chase for rapture. A lot of the lines in the song come from that night. Fighting and sodomy on LSD were just destined to ensue. In these moments of rapture, the greatest pleasures came from our defiance. Our defiance against this world, this regime, and our bodies. So maybe ‘Disco III’ is a love song...but from hell.” **Don’t Kiss Me in Public** “Heartless cinema is what I use to describe films that have no passion and were made with the intention of turning a profit off of exploiting a subculture. These films are often emotionally manipulative with no real character development of their black or trans characters. I see this more in TV right now, by the way. Anyway, I used it in the song to describe the performative gestures people use to claim your body. In that way that hurts, in the way that rips you from your autonomy. So pretty much it’s a song about being used, but not in the hot way. But, alas, I\'m the one who is a titty baby in the end because I let myself be used again. Maybe there is some part of that darkness and sadness that gives me a thrill, but I think I\'ve learned my lesson though.” **All Tomorrow’s Carry** “In this song, I was writing about the nuances of being a daily witness to Black suffering but also Black joy while also experiencing both those things in my own body. I was sitting by the train tracks at a punk show, as tanks rode by on a train as the bands played. For a long time I have focused on partying rather than actually trying to build trust and connections in my community, and that is one of the most violent things a gentrifier can do. I\'m always thinking about violence and gentrification; we should all talk about it more, but it\'s just so easy to be complacent, especially when the world is a mess and your house is dilapidated and falling apart. You just want for everything to be easy and to escape, especially if no one has ever actually offered you concrete tools to heal yourself. I feel blessed I have people in my life supporting that growth and offering me those tools now, but I was writing about that feeling when you know you need to change but also don\'t know how—but actually you do, it just takes agonizing daily work. It\'s interesting now with the uprisings—I listen to this song and ‘Are we going out tonight?’ turns from a bratty, messy party girl inquiry to a commanding decree summoning us to go out and fight the police and YES WE ARE GOING OUT TONIGHT! That makes the song magic. That is exactly what New Orleans breeds, and I am proud to call it home.” **A Depravity Such As This...** “This was the only improvised song we made in the studio for this album. I asked Maria \[Elena, guitarist\] what it should be about and she was like, ‘Please, not another song about a girl! Maybe the city?’ And I was like, ‘What if I wrote a song about the city as if she was my lover?’ Everyone rolled their eyes, but it worked out and we all love it. I really just do love wet heat...” **Homogenized Milk** “I was in a whole mood when I wrote this. I think the final lyrics—‘You and I are not uniquely fucked’—sum it all up. I am frustrated with the state of things. Especially how I feel that most view violence on some hierarchical system, that some violence is more harmful than others. The psychological terror of white supremacy is just so maddening and everywhere. We need to talk about it.” **Passion** “Ruth Mascelli \[keyboards/electronics\] back at it again with her dreamy textured soundscapes. This marks the middle of the journey through *The Passion Of*. There were a lot of feelings to sit with and unpack, and these textured sounds give a sense of wonder and disillusionment (the number one survival mechanism) as we persist and move forward.” **Head** “We pop you out of your disillusionment straight into a whole-ass mess. A ticking time bomb of an explosion of obsession and suffering. This song was written years ago but didn’t get recorded in time to put on our last album, *Spiraling*, but still the song fits in the oeuvre of the Special Interest canon. I was battling with obsession, not being able to truly see myself or my actions. I wanted to be anywhere other than in my head with all my demons. It’s a fun song, but I feel the pain in my heart every time I sing it. There is nothing worse than the terror and illusions your mind can create when you are in pain.” **Tina** “This song is funny and fun. I love a lot of people struggling with substances and wanted to write a funny song acknowledging that struggle. I want everyone I know and love struggling with something to know that I am here for you always, sis! So yes, ‘Tina’ is another love song.” **Street Pulse Beat** “The street is alive, it has a pulse. It\'s the pulse that moves us forward towards liberation. When a love doesn\'t work, your street pulse weakens and you lose sight of who you are. It’s not a song of unrequited love—though at the time you couldn’t tell me otherwise—but about a love so pure it had to be let go. It\'s about wanting someone to save you when you know in the end you are the only one to save yourself. It is agonizing to love someone so. My heart rips open every time I hear or sing it. One thing I do know is that we will always be fighting in the streets side by side because our pulse now is strong within us both without each other. So in the end, this song is an ode to change. God is change.” **With Love** “Where are we now at the end of our journey? What have we faced, what have we learned? I had to end the album with this love letter directed at everyone who hears it. I wrote it over the course of five days as my friends kiki’d around me. It is a personal letter I wrote to you all, it is a spell. May we all keep transforming ourselves into the people we want to be. May we rise in the midst of all hope that has been co-opted by this regime. May we live our lives decadently, in splendor. May we learn to work with, understand, and struggle with everyone around us until we all taste the sweetness that is freedom. I look around the room and see nothing but black trans bodies laughing and smiling. My passion is our devotion to love and transformation. May all the mutants of the Mississippi River swim in clean water one day...”

But would you bat an eye waiting for war machines to pass you by? But aren’t we going out tonight? Aren’t we going out? Special Interest have returned with their sophomore LP. A dual release from Night School (EU) and Thrilling Living (US). The Passion Of... combines elements of glam rock and no wave pushed through a mangled filter of contemporary electronic forms. Special Interest present a precise and deranged vision of punk, an apocalyptic celebration, a step forward into a perverse and uncertain landscape. AVAILABLE ON VINYL: US: thrillingliving.bandcamp.com EU: night-school.bandcamp.com

Stay on it! This is the future! This is the spectral dreaming, the reshaped soundwaves of post-Katrina, post-Osage Avenue, post-Obamacare that we borrow from to do this work, so stay on it. Who Sent You? they said from their liquid cryo-chamber, from a low-light induction field cobbled together with lithium rods, with melted down Romare Bearden and Howardena Pindell paintings, stitched with chaos fibers and placed in the center of the carrion husk of a burnt out shanty town. They took time to scrape ashen samples of what was, their souls the residue thick and caked on, that still climbs those new high-rise condominiums like moss—the only evidence that they were once there, that they were baked into the fabric of this planet—they were there fixing elevators and tossing wrenches into quantum fields until they were stopped! frisked! and turned into weird, 100-foot martyr murals on the backside, the north side, of supermarket walls—Who Sent You? is how the matrix modulation works. Dig it: Who Sent You? is the punk-rocking of jazz and the mystification of the avant-garde, a sci-fi sound from that out-soul-fire jazz quintet Irreversible Entanglements. Who Sent You? they asked and tried to lock us in their distress chambers, and yet here it is: an album that functions as a heat-sealed care package for the modern Afrofuturist’s pre-flight machinations. This record weaves kinetic soul fusion, dreamy yet harrowing spectral poetry, and intricate force-field-tight rhythms into wild, warmth-giving tapestries that comfort and conceal, confront and coerce all at once, with the dark matter of the deep, black all-consuming universe as its thread. Where the band’s self-titled debut was all explosive noisy anthems and glorious cosmic bluster, Who Sent You? is a focused and patient ritual. Irreversible Entanglements take their time in between these grooves, stalking the war-torn streets of the Deep South and post-Columbian apocalypses—taking their time to add our DNA to the centrifuge, to dream up an alchemical amalgamation that sounds truly euphoric, drenched in the epic star-flung fallout of a nova only they can conjure. More than the sum of its parts—Luke Stewart’s war-like basslines, Keir Neuringer’s haunting saxophone, Aquiles Navarro’s cyberpunk brass, the unwieldy storm of Tcheser Holmes’ drums, and the oracular phyletic incantations of Camae Ayewa—Who Sent You? is an entire holistic jam of “infinite possibilities coming back around,” a sprawling meditation for afro-cosmonauts, a reminder of the forms and traumas of the past, and the shape and vision of Afrotopian sounds to come.

The legendary experimental pop outfit returns with a brand-new record entitled Figures, written, conceived and produced over the last couple of years by Marc Hollander (founder of Aksak Maboul and of the Crammed label) and Véronique Vincent (former singer with The Honeymoon Killers). Figures is a double album containing 22 tracks and interludes, resulting from the flow of creative ideas which arose after a gap of over thirty years (see the Aksak story overleaf). Drawing again from the multiple sources which have always inspired the band (from electronic music and pop to experimentation, jazz, minimalism, contemporary classical etc), Aksak Maboul transcends and reconfigures them with its inimitable style, to create an impressive, rich and unclassifiable piece of work. Seamlessly weaving electronic and acoustic instrumentation, improvisation and programming, songs, beats, found objects and sound collages, the album works as a labyrinth, full of secret passages and interconnections. Figures clocks in at 75 minutes, thus deliberately shunning the laws of instant gratification and the myth of today’s reduced attention span: the Aksak Maboul aficionados will surely be happy to engage in an immersive session of deep listening (in two halves), in order to enjoy the album’s many layers and details. Véronique Vincent & Marc Hollander wrote the album together, by following parallel courses with their own respective internal logic, while remaining closely connected. Enigmatic and finely chiseled, feeding on her love for painting and literature, Véronique’s texts form a dense fabric which mirrors the sonic kaleidoscope assembled by Marc, who wrote and arranged all the music (aside from a track co-written and sung by Véronique and Julien Gasc). Véronique also made the drawings and paintings which illustrate the cover and inserts. The two protagonists recorded most of the album in their own studio, with contributions by the young members of Aksak Maboul’s current live line-up: Faustine Hollander (bass, vocals, co-production), guitarist Lucien Fraipont and drummer Erik Heestermans. Also featured are performances by several friends and guests, including revered improvisor Fred Frith, Tuxedomoon’s Steven Brown, members of Aquaserge (Julien Gasc, Audrey Ginestet & Benjamin Glibert), former band members (including Michel Berckmans and Sebastiaan Van den Branden), and several others

It’s been “Red Summer” for over a hundred years. While the term “Red Summer” typically refers to the race-driven violence in the Summer of 1919 across the United States, its repercussions, its vocabulary can be felt or heard on every corner of every street. In Chicago, it has a special significance, as Chicago was one of two catalysts for that era’s violence, exploded by invisible racial borders along the South Side, a phenomenon that exists today, constantly considered by long-running gospel industrial band ONO. ONO bandleader P Michael Grego and frontperson travis had met before 1980, sharing a love for written and spoken word, the transcendent, and the genuine. Through continual poking and prodding, P Michael convinced travis to join him in ONO, the name coming from shortening “onomatopoeia,” and underscoring a desire to create “noise not music.” P Michael would handle the audio. travis the words. Since January 5, 1980, ONO’s roster has changed drastically, but always fiercely defended a singular construct: “The ONO STATEMENT OF PURPOSE: Experimental Performance, NOISE, and Industrial Poetry Performance Band; Exploring Gospel's Darkest Conflicts, Tragedies and Premises.” ONO began Red Summer in 2015 and finished three years later. It is a record about Chicago, racial violence, and the long arm of history, starting with events as distant - and relevant - as 1619, the year the Dutch ship Pearl filled with African slaves appeared on the American East Coast. This is where the record begins - the unsettling, carnivalesque overture “20th August 1619.” Frontperson Travis begins “SOLD! 23 ‘Negars!’ N-E-G-A-R-S!! FIELD ‘Negars’ good as Gold! Money down!” It’s a jarring moment, but what’s not jarring about the arrival of slavery? Ono frequently packages disturbing lyrics or content into absurd, even catchy songs. Take the groovy funk track “I Dream of Sodomy,” an ONO live staple for nearly six years. P Michel’s earworm bassline is a persuasive siren, so much so that when the chorus - “I Dream of Sodomy” repeated multiple times - hits, somehow it’s hard not to sing along. On this song, travis meditates on his Black and Native American heritage, Haitian reparations, and sexual abuse at the hands of a commanding officer in the Vietnam era while he served in the U.S. Navy. Other songs like “Coon” transform from glacial, elegiac mood-pieces into danceable numbers, all the while musing on racial violence in the U.S. history and militarism. “Early morning, greasy spoon,” travis incants for the chorus. “Possum fat for the hainty coon” before shifting the song’s narrative to a Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft and the potential for a [Future] all-Black NSA/SAC U-2/SR-71 fighter squadron that turns revolutionary mid-flight! Though Red Summer is named after a specific era, it explodes temporal constraints, necessarily so. As is made clear in books like Claire Hartfield’s A Few Red Drops and Cameron McWhirter’s Red Summer, these things are hard to bookend. Racial violence occurred before the Red Summer, and it is still occuring now - systemically, to boot. We hope that this record instills a need to learn, to study, and functions as an inlet into something much bigger. - Jordan Reyes c/o ONO

Drew Daniel’s solo alias The Soft Pink Truth was originally fueled by a distinctly madcap energy. Without the elaborate conceptual frameworks of his duo Matmos, Baltimore-based Daniel was free to let his imagination run wild. His 2003 debut, *Do You Party?*, braided politics with pleasure in gonzo glitch techno; with *Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth?* and then *Why Do the Heathen Rage?*, he turned his idiosyncratic IDM to covers of punk rock and black metal. But *Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?* steps away from those audacious hijinks. Composed with a rich array of electronic and acoustic tones, and suffused in vintage Roland Space Echo, the album strikes a balance between ambient and classical minimalism; created in response to politically motivated feelings of sadness and anger, it is also a meditation on community and interdependency. Guest vocalists Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian, and Jana Hunter make up the album’s choral core; percussionist Sarah Hennies lays down flickering bell-tone rhythms, while John Berndt and Horse Lords’ Andrew Bernstein weave sinewy saxophone into the mix, and Daniel’s partner, M.C. Schmidt, lends spare, contemplative piano melodies. The result is a nine-part suite as affecting as it is ambitious, where devotional vocal harmonies spill into softly pulsing house rhythms, and shimmering abstractions alternate with songs as gentle as lullabies.

The Soft Pink Truth is Drew Daniel, one half of acclaimed electronic duo Matmos, Shakespearean scholar and a celebrated producer and sound artist. Daniel started the project as an outlet to explore visceral and sublime sounds that fall outside of Matmos’ purview, drawing on his vast knowledge of rave, black metal and crust punk obscurities while subverting and critiquing established genre expectations. On the new album Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? Daniel takes a bold and surprising new direction, exploring a hypnagogic and ecstatic space somewhere between deep dance music and classical minimalism as a means of psychic healing. Shall We Go On Sinning… began life as an emotional response to the creeping rise of fascism around the globe, creativity as a form of self-care, resulting in an album of music that expressed joy and gratitude. Daniel explains: “The election of Donald Trump made me feel very angry and sad, but I didn’t want to make “angry white guy” music in a purely reactive mode. I felt that I needed to make music through a different process, and to a different emotional outcome, to get past a private feeling of powerlessness by making musical connections with friends and people I admire, to make something that felt socially extended and affirming.” What began with Daniel quickly evolved into a promiscuous and communal undertaking. Vocals provided by the chorus of Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian and Jana Hunter form the foundation of most of the tracks, sometimes left naked and unchanged as with the ethereal opening line (“Shall”) or the sensuous R&B refrains on “We”, at other times shrouded in effects and morphed into new forms. Stately piano melodies written by Daniel’s partner M.C. Schmidt as well as Koye Berry alongside entrancing vibraphone and percussion patterns from Sarah Hennies push tracks toward ecstatic and melodic peaks, while rich saxophone textures played by Andrew Bernstein (Horse Lords) and John Berndt are used to add color and texture throughout. The album’s overall sound was in part shaped by Daniel hosting Mitchell Brown of GASP during Maryland Deathfest. Daniel borrowed Brown’s Roland Space Echo tape unit which he then used extensively throughout to give the album a flickering, ethereal quality. By moving beyond simple plunderphonic sampling and opening up a genuine dialogue with other musicians, Daniel left room in his compositions for moments of genuine surprise, capturing the freeform, communal energy of a DJ set or live improvisation session more than a recording project. Shall We Go On Sinning, a biblical quote from Paul the Apostle, was chosen by Daniel because it describes a question that he was applying both to his creative practice and how one should live in the world. The melodies, jubilance, and meditative nature of album provides a much-needed escape from the contemporary hell-scape. The process of creating Shall We Go On Sinning, in and of itself, is the Soft Pink Truth’s way of championing creativity and community over rage and nihilism.

The planets align as the mighty Sun Ra Arkestra, under the direction of the maestro Marshall Allen, are releasing their first studio album in over twenty years, ‘Swirling’. “We truly hope that this recording brings much joy to a planet which is so deeply in need of a spirit sound and vibration,” states saxophonist Knoel Scott. “We hope it contributes to a change in the ominous direction of man’s journey through the cosmos.” “This new release is the Arkestra’s love offering to the world,” concludes Marshall Allen. “Beta music for a better world.” Recorded at Rittenhouse Soundworks in Philadelphia, the new recording represents the continuation of a heartfelt rebirth of the Arkestra under Allen’s guidance since Sun Ra left the planet in 1993, gaining new generations of followers from their regular touring across the globe. With a big band line-up featuring long-standing Arkestra members including Danny Ray Thompson (RIP), Michael Ray, Vincent Chancey, Knoel Scott, Cecil Brooks, Atakatune (RIP), Elson Nascimento and Tyler Mitchell, the album is a full-blooded celebration of Sun Ra’s legacy.

You don’t need to know that Fiona Apple recorded her fifth album herself in her Los Angeles home in order to recognize its handmade clatter, right down to the dogs barking in the background at the end of the title track. Nor do you need to have spent weeks cooped up in your own home in the middle of a global pandemic in order to more acutely appreciate its distinct banging-on-the-walls energy. But it certainly doesn’t hurt. Made over the course of eight years, *Fetch the Bolt Cutters* could not possibly have anticipated the disjointed, anxious, agoraphobic moment in history in which it was released, but it provides an apt and welcome soundtrack nonetheless. Still present, particularly on opener “I Want You to Love Me,” are Apple’s piano playing and stark (and, in at least one instance, literal) diary-entry lyrics. But where previous albums had lush flourishes, the frenetic, woozy rhythm section is the dominant force and mood-setter here, courtesy of drummer Amy Wood and former Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg. The sparse “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is backed by drumsticks seemingly smacking whatever surface might be in sight. “Relay” (featuring a refrain, “Evil is a relay sport/When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch,” that Apple claims was excavated from an old journal from written she was 15) is driven almost entirely by drums that are at turns childlike and martial. None of this percussive racket blunts or distracts from Apple’s wit and rage. There are instantly indelible lines (“Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up” and the show-stopping “Good morning, good morning/You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”), all in the service of channeling an entire society’s worth of frustration and fluster into a unique, urgent work of art that refuses to sacrifice playfulness for preaching.

Autechre albums are like language immersion programs: At first they don’t make sense, but listen close and familiar shapes emerge. Not that *SIGN* is accessible per se: We’re still talking about something closer to computer programming than what most people would consider music. But for a group that can be almost mythically forbidding (2016’s four-hour-long—and 12-hours-dense—*elseq*), *SIGN* is almost pop. Thirty years in and the UK production duo’s roots still show: Hip-hop on “M4 Lema,” house on “psin AM,” far-out synth soundtracks on “F7” and “Metaz form8.” But it all remains deconstructed and once removed. Most music depends on memories of something you’ve heard before. With Autechre, you can feel your brain stretch as you listen. Normally they sound like they’re pushing forward or settling in. With *SIGN*, it’s both.

The album was recorded in the winter of 2017. I always feel that the cello is a kind of instrument that is full of sorrow and narration, like an aged intoning the past repeatedly and sadly alone. In my ordinary work, the concept of “narration” is always excluded on purpose. Or, it is taken as a part that I don’t want to deal with but have to. Thus, the cello, which is particular but unitary for me, can express a kind of true emotion which is very “clumsy”, because true emotions always seem to be clumsy by being direct and parched. This album emphasizes the concept of “performer”, which refers to the one, the fingers, the power and the immediate state of the breath when playing the instrument, without overmuch decoration and editing, or splendid and adept performing skills. Each track was performed and recorded from start to finish once and once again, in which some mistakes were retained and chosen reasonably. The name of each track is made from the names of gods in Bon religion. Those gods are the creators of the beginning of the universe. Their original form is egg, which transformed into space. The time and space structure they created was bulks of passivity. That’s Bon religion’s descriptions of the universe and the world. If certain cognition of forms must be given to gods and time and space, the best description that breaks the linear conception would be the space of “passivity”, in which music was born. The world view of oviparity is full of uncertainty. It grows and dies under a set structure of bulk. -gogoj a.k.a Sheng Jie

With *Artlessly Falling*, the follow-up to her acclaimed 2018 release, *Code Girl*, guitarist and MacArthur Fellow Mary Halvorson takes an already intriguing quintet lineup and slightly but significantly expands it. By adding Maria Grand not only on tenor saxophone but also vocals, she manages to create a small de facto horn section (Grand with trumpeter Adam O’Farrill) as well as a kind of mini-choir (Grand with vocalist Amirtha Kidambi). The resulting harmonized lines and ethereal passages broaden Halvorson’s compositional reach. Bassist Michael Formanek and drummer Tomas Fujiwara bring out all sorts of textural and interactive elements and power the rhythm forward during charged improvisations. But the most beguiling presence of all has to be that of Robert Wyatt, UK art-rock pioneer and founding member of Soft Machine—a longtime hero of Halvorson’s who makes an exception to his announced 2014 retirement to appear with her. His vocals on “The Lemon Trees,” “Walls and Roses,” and “Bigger Flames” have a gentle yet mysterious quality, quite distinct in the high and low registers. He’s relaxed and in command when dealing with Halvorson’s challenging melodic shapes, and that sense of calm balances the music’s prickly timbres and dissonant avant-rock, free-jazz energy.

The first verse we hear on Jay Electronica’s *A Written Testimony* comes from JAY-Z. The God MC opens “Ghost of Soulja Slim,” the second track on the album, which follows an intro comprising mostly remarks from Minister Louis Farrakhan—adding an extra four minutes to the decade-plus many fans have waited to hear Jay Electronica rap on his debut album. Having Jigga bat leadoff registers as much less of a stunt in the context of the full project, and only helps build the anticipation. JAY-Z appears on nearly every song on *A Written Testimony*, assuming a partner-in-rhyme role not unlike the one Ghostface Killah played on Raekwon’s seminal *Only Built 4 Cuban Linx*. The Jays sound likewise inspired by each other, yielding the mic for continuous intervals of elite-level MCing, delivering bars both forthright and poetic, and also steeped in phrasings uncommon outside of the written word. “If you want to be a master in life, you must submit to a master/I was born to lock horns with the Devil at the brink of the hereafter,” Electronica raps on “The Neverending Story.” Electronica is credited with the bulk of production on the album, with additional contributions from No I.D. and The Alchemist, along with the all-star team (Swizz Beatz, Araabmuzik, Hit-Boy, G. Ry) responsible for “The Blinding.” The MC raps in Spanish on “Fruits of the Spirit,” and though he shouts out Vince Staples, Marvel villain Thanos, and cosmetic butt injections, there are very few references on *A Written Testimony* that could date the album long-term. The goal here was very clearly to make a timeless project, one we should appreciate considering there’s no telling if or when we will get another.

If you’ve ever travelled to Egypt and wandered through its crowded streets, you probably ended up buying a cassette or a CDR of popular synth based music heard in most cabs, cabarets, or alleys around town: the almighty Shaabi. Raed Yassin and Paed Conca based their project PRAED on research between Shaabi and Mouled (traditional trance music from Egypt) and the hypnotic structures of both these genres. Repetitive beats, loud Mizmar and loads of energy, with a strong influence from psychedelic rock, free jazz and electronica.   During the years in which the duo produced 4 albums and performed on an endless number of stages around the globe, PRAED started working on an ambitious expansive project: an orchestra that could transpose this study of rural and popular culture into an immense, iconic work. In autumn 2018, supported by the Sharjah Art Foundation, PRAED Orchestra! premiered “Live in Sharjah”, interpreting new material merged with some of the band’s iconic pieces. The composition process started with the choice of musicians: the line-up consisted of some of the most innovative artists coming from a wide spectrum of musical practices. Each musician was chosen for a defined role, and the common denominator was their capacity to interpret written material, and their ability to improvise effortlessly. Each role was clearly set to work in unison with the rest of the group, while simultaneously sustaining a centrality in the choir. Solo parts masterfully drawn over the structure as a fil rouge connecting every piece of the entire concert; massive and powerful orchestral sections leading to a breathtaking trance-like state of mind; all of this material ultimately coalescing into an Egyptian Operette that narrates the sorrow, love, and deeply rooted culture of this urban music called Shaabi.

On the heels of her celebrated one-woman debut, *The Oracle*, Angel Bat Dawid is heard at JazzFest Berlin with her band Tha Brothahood on *Live*. The spell she casts on vocals, clarinet, and keyboards is rooted in the legacy of Chicago free jazz, with an approach to song that’s reminiscent of Sun Ra’s and Nina Simone’s. In fact, Sun Ra’s “Enlightenment,” reworked as a doleful out-of-tempo ballad, leads off the set, and already the emotion in Bat Dawid’s voice is palpable. The circumstances at this festival were not altogether happy—a story that rises to the surface on “VIKTORious Return,” which is simply Bat Dawid tearfully greeting bandmate and fellow vocalist Viktor Le Givens, whose arrival in Berlin was delayed by a frightening hospitalization. Working through these and other adversities, she and the group take a strong anti-racist stand from the stage, imploring audience members to join in the grooving communal chant of “Black Family” (“the Black family is the strongest institution in the world”). Bat Dawid offers several other compelling elaborations on material from *The Oracle*, including “London” and “We Are Starzz,” in the company of bassist Dr. Adam Zanolini, drummers Isaiah Collier and Asher Gamedze, and the rest of a deeply simpatico octet. But she also unveils a generous amount of new material, including “Melo Deez From Heab’N,” the rhythmic lilt and phrasing of which capture her funky songcraft at its best.

Tara Clerkin Trio present their self titled debut LP on Laura Lies In. Similar to that directorial effect of filming at double speed and then slowing down for playback, the record ambles with assurance, expertly paced. Opening with a jovial cacophony before the beatific ‘in the room’ confidently relieves, washing away any unease with an innately alien familiarity. Coming to with the padded percussive patterns of 'Helenica', taking a moment to remember where you are in this temporal smudge. The serene contemplation of 'Any of these' signals we're homeward with a dependable afterglow, a friend you don’t need to thank for a good weekend. A record existing disconnected from the daily getyadowns, a holiday from life, optimism as resistance against mundanity, something extraordinary amongst the ordinary, positively grey. Recorded and produced by Dominic Mitchison. Mastered by Rupert Clervaux.

clipping.\'s second entry in their horror anthology collection follows up 2019\'s *There Existed an Addiction to Blood* by conjuring up an atmosphere that rarely allows a moment to catch your breath. William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes\' experimental production pushes their concepts even further, drawing inspiration from traditional hip-hop (\"Say the Name\" mixes a Geto Boys sample within a Chicago house music vibe, while \"Eaten Alive\" is a disorienting tribute to No Limit Records), power electronics (the blown-out blast of \"Make Them Dead\"), and EVP field samplings (the urgent \"Pain Everyday\"). These textured compositions allow Daveed Diggs\' narration to take center stage as he reconceptualizes scary-movie tropes with today\'s modern societal terrors, fleshed out by a couple of eclectic features. Cam & China flip the \"final girl\" cliché on its head on the uptempo \"’96 Neve Campbell,\" while alt-rap duo Ho99o9 relate inner city violence to auto-cannibalism on the industrial-leaning \"Looking Like Meat.\" Here the Los Angeles-based trio takes Apple Music through the record\'s many horrors. **Say the Name** William Hutson: “I had always wanted to make a track using that phrase from the Geto Boys, and we had talked about doing a Dance Mania Chicago ghetto house track about *Candyman*. I always liked that idea of a slow, plodding, more dance-oriented track, using that line repeated as a hook.” Daveed Diggs: “We had always talked about how that line is one of the scariest lines in rap music, it\'s just really good writing. Scarface does that better than anybody. What we had was this very Chicago, these really specific reference points, to me, that I had to connect. That\'s how I saw the challenge in my head, was like there\'s this very Texas lyric and this very Chicago concept. Fortunately, *Candyman* already does that for you. It\'s already about the legacy of slavery in this country. So I just got to lean into those things.” **’96 Neve Campbell (feat. Cam & China)** Jonathan Snipes: “This was actually the second thing we sent them—we made an earlier beat that had a sample that we couldn\'t clear. We wanted to make something that sounds a little more like jerk music and something that\'s a little bit more tailored for them.” WH: \"We didn\'t have our *Halloween*, *Friday the 13th* slasher song. The idea was to not have Daveed on it at all, except to rap the hooks, and just to have female rappers basically standing in for the final girl in a slasher movie. But then we liked Daveed\'s lines, we wanted him to keep rapping on it.” DD: “It felt too short with just two verses. We were like, ‘Well, put me on the phone and make me be the killer.’” WH: “There\'s a Benny the Butcher song called \'’97 Hov,\' this idea of referring to a song by a date and a person that\'s the vibe you\'re going for. So some of the suggestions were like, \'’79 Jamie Lee Curtis\' or \'’82 Heather Langenkamp.\' But then with Daveed on the phone and making a *Scream* reference, \'’96 Neve Campbell\' made more sense.” **Something Underneath** DD: “There\'s a whole batch of songs we recorded in New York while I was also doing a play, and so we\'d work all day and then I\'d go do this show at night. For a long time, there was a version of this one that I couldn\'t stand the vocal performance on. It\'s obviously a pretty technical song, and I just never nailed it and I sound tired and all of this. So it ended up being the last thing we finished.” **Make Them Dead** WH: “We did ‘Body & Blood’ and ‘Wriggle,’ which both take literal samples from power electronic artists and turned them into dance songs. The idea for this was, let\'s do a song that instead of borrows from power electronics and makes it into a dance song, let\'s try to just make a heavy, slow, plodding thing that feels like real power electronics.” DD: “When we finally settled on how this song should be lyrically, it was actually hard to write. Just trying to capture that same feel. There\'s something about power electronics that feels instructional, feels like it\'s ordering you to do something. The politics around it are varied, depending on who is making the stuff. But in order to sit within that, it had to feel political and instructional, but then that had to agree with us.” **She Bad** WH: “That\'s our witchcraft track.” JS: “Obviously, this ended up having some melodies in it, but it started as those, but it really is just field recordings and modular synths, and there isn\'t a beat so much and the melody is very obtuse in the hooks. It\'s mostly just looped and cut field recordings.” DD: “I\'ve been moving away from something that we did in a lot of our previous records, like really super visual, like precise visual storytelling that feels really cinematic, where I\'m just actually pointing the camera at things, so that was fun to try that again.” **Invocation (Interlude) (with Greg Stuart)** WH: “It\'s a joke about Alvin Lucier\'s beat pattern music, his wave songs and things like that, but done as if it was trying to summon the devil.” **Pain Everyday (with Michael Esposito)** DD: “I love this song so much. Also, I definitely learned while writing it why people don\'t write whole rap songs in 7/8. It\'s not easy. The math, the hidden math in those verses is intense. It kept breaking my brain, but now that it\'s all down, I can\'t hear it any other way, it sounds fine. But getting there was such a mindfuck.” WH: “So then the idea was it\'s in 7/8, it\'s about a lynched ghost, so the idea we had was a chase scene of the ghost of murdered victims of lynching.” **Check the Lock** WH: “This was conceived as a sequel to a song by Seagram and Scarface called ‘Sleepin in My Nikes.’ That was a rap song about extreme paranoia that I always thought was cool and felt like a horror, like an aspect of horror.” JS: “This is the one time on this album that we let ourselves do that like John Carpenter-y, creepy synth thing.” **Looking Like Meat (feat Ho99o9)** DD: “I think they reached out wanting to do a song, and this had always felt, we always wanted this to be like a posse track, kind of. This was another one that I wasn\'t going to write a voice for actually, we were going to try to find a better verse.” JS: “Which is why the hooks are all different—we were going to fill them in specifically with features, but sometimes features don\'t work out. This is like our attempt at making the more sort of aggressive, like a thing that sounds more like noise rap than we usually do.” WH: “The first thing on this beat was I bought 20 little music boxes that all played different songs, and I stuck them all to a sounding board and put contact microphones on it, and just cranked them each at the same time.” **Eaten Alive (with Jeff Parker & Ted Byrnes)** DD: “I had been in this phase of listening to Nipsey \[Hussle\] all day, every day, and all I wanted to do was figure out how to rap like that. So from his cadence perspective, it\'s like my best Nipsey impression, which we didn\'t know was going to turn into a posthumous tribute.” WH: “And the rapping was also partly a tribute, just spiritually a tribute to No Limit Records. That\'s why it\'s called \'Eaten Alive,\' which is named after a Tobe Hooper horror movie about a swamp.” **Body for the Pile (with Sickness)** WH: “It already came out \[in 2016\]. It ended up being on an Adult Swim compilation called *NOISE*. We did it with Chris Goudreau, our friend who is just a legendary noise artist called Sickness.” JS: “We always thought that would be a great song to save for a horror record, and then years went by and we weren\'t going to include it, because we thought, ‘Well, it\'s out and it\'s done.’ We looked around and I don\'t know, that comp isn\'t really anywhere and that track is hard to find, and we really like it and we thought it fit really nice. When we started putting it in the lineup of tracks and listening to it as an album, we realized it fit really nicely.” **Enlacing** WH: “The cosmic pessimism of H.P. Lovecraft is all about the horror of discovering how small you are in the universe and how uncaring the universe is. So this song was about accessing that fear by getting way too high on Molly and ketamine at the same time, then discovering Cthulhu or Azathoth as a result of getting way too fucking high.” JS: “My memory is that this was never intended to be a clipping. song, that you and I made this beat as an example of, ‘Hey, we can make normal beats.’” DD: “That Lovecraftian idea was something that we played in opposition to a lot on *Splendor & Misery*, so it was good to revisit in a way where we were actually playing into it, and also it definitely feels to me like just being way too high.” **Secret Piece** WH: “We wanted to really tie the two albums together, so the idea was to get everyone who played on any of the albums to contribute their one note. So we assembled the recordings of dawn and forests, and then almost everyone who played on either of these two albums contributed one note.” JS: “We have a habit of ending our albums with a piece of processed music or contemporary music. We ended *midcity* with a take on a Steve Reich phased loop idea, and we ended *CLPPNG* with a John Cage piece, and then *There Existed* ends with Annea Lockwood\'s \'Piano Burning.\' So we wanted something that felt like the sun was coming up at the end of the horror movie, a little bit.” WH: “That was the idea was that we were exiting, it\'s dawn in a forest. So dawn in a forest in a slasher movie or a horror movie usually means you\'re safe, right? The end of *Friday the 13th* one, the sun comes up and she\'s in the little boat, but that doesn\'t end well for her either. We did not have the jump scare at the end like *Friday the 13th*.” DD: “I pushed for it a little bit, but some people thought it was too corny.”

additional thanks to Akeema Zane, Caleb Giles, and Allah. Mastered by tha only Zeroh. may Allah continue to blesss and protect u. peace be upon u with love. black be tha god. tke tyme n enjoy. life is short. choas is necessary. u are allowed to be angry. tha balance is needed. Cover Painting by Junkyard instagram.com/junkyard_jydk?igshid=12071ec54xyx Original photo by Eric Coleman www.mochilla.com/coleman for more information visit www.negro.life

Following up her inspired recordings with Ran Blake, André Matos, Ingrid Laubrock, and others, vocalist Sara Serpa gathers a most intriguing mix of players on the ambitious song cycle *Recognition*. It’s a striking departure in terms of sound and subject matter, written to accompany an abstract film made from Super 8 video shot by Serpa’s grandfather in Angola and Portugal in the early ’60s. The process helped Serpa come to grips with her Portuguese heritage and family history, bound up as it is with Portugal’s legacy of colonial oppression. There are no drums, but pianist David Virelles and harpist Zeena Parkins provide percussive foundations sometimes akin to drumbeats, as well as basslines and a wealth of other timbres and tones. Tenor saxophonist Mark Turner joins Serpa as a featured melodic voice as they tackle graceful unisons, dissonant harmonic passages, and complex contrapuntal ideas. Serpa’s vocal parts are mostly wordless, though she sings lyrics on the closer, “Unity and Struggle.” In places she also recites text by the late revolutionary Amílcar Cabral and others. The result is haunting, full of contrast in mood and pace, alive with the flexible feeling of improvisation amid all the compositional rigor.

Directed by Portuguese vocalist-composer Sara Serpa, in collaboration with film director Bruno Soares. An interdisciplinary documentary melding film imagery with music, Recognition uses Serpa’s family archival footage shot in the 1960’s in the then colony of Angola, ruled by Salazar’s fascist regime. Taking as point of departure Portugal’s denial in confronting its colonial past, the material has been intervened and edited so to shatter lingering presumptions. It creates a sensory experience in which music and image are juxtaposed with texts by anti-colonial revolutionary Amílcar Cabral, Angolan writer Luandino Vieira and historian Linda Heywood. The documentary explores the clash between two realities: one verbally described by the colonized and the other captured by the colonizer, exposing an often silenced narrative, still a tabu today, while inviting the viewer/listener to reflect on history in a visceral way.

Stephen Bruner’s fourth album as Thundercat is shrouded in loss—of love, of control, of his friend Mac Miller, who Bruner exchanged I-love-yous with over the phone hours before Miller’s overdose in late 2018. Not that he’s wallowing. Like 2017’s *Drunk*—an album that helped transform the bassist/singer-songwriter from jazz-fusion weirdo into one of the vanguard voices in 21st-century black music—*It Is What It Is* is governed by an almost cosmic sense of humor, juxtaposing sophisticated Afro-jazz (“Innerstellar Love”) with deadpan R&B (“I may be covered in cat hair/But I still smell good/Baby, let me know, how do I look in my durag?”), abstractions about mortality (“Existential Dread”) with chiptune-style punk about how much he loves his friend Louis Cole. “Yeah, it’s been an interesting last couple of years,” he tells Apple Music with a sigh. “But there’s always room to be stupid.” What emerges from the whiplash is a sense that—as the title suggests—no matter how much we tend to label things as good or bad, happy or sad, the only thing they are is what they are. (That Bruner keeps good company probably helps: Like on *Drunk*, the guest list here is formidable, ranging from LA polymaths like Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Louis Cole, and coproducer Flying Lotus to Childish Gambino, Ty Dolla $ign, and former Slave singer Steve Arrington.) As for lessons learned, Bruner is Zen as he runs through each of the album’s tracks. “It’s just part of it,” he says. “It’s part of the story. That’s why the name of the album is what it is—\[Mac’s death\] made me put my life in perspective. I’m happy I’m still here.” **Lost in Space / Great Scott / 22-26** \"Me and \[keyboardist\] Scott Kinsey were just playing around a bit. I like the idea of something subtle for the intro—you know, introducing somebody to something. Giving people the sense that there’s a ride about to happen.\" **Innerstellar Love** \"So you go from being lost in space and then suddenly thrust into purpose. The feel is a bit of an homage to where I’ve come from with Kamasi \[Washington, who plays the saxophone\] and my brother \[drummer Ronald Bruner, Jr.\]: very jazz, very black—very interstellar.\" **I Love Louis Cole (feat. Louis Cole)** \"It’s quite simply stated: Louis Cole is, hands down, one of my favorite musicians. Not just as a performer, but as a songwriter and arranger. \[*Cole is a polymathic solo artist and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a member of the group KNOWER.*\] The last time we got to work together was on \[*Drunk*’s\] \'Bus in These Streets.\' He inspires me. He reminds me to keep doing better. I’m very grateful I get to hang out with a guy like Louis Cole. You know, just me punching a friend of his and falling asleep in his laundry basket.\" **Black Qualls (feat. Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington & Childish Gambino)** \"Steve Lacy titled this song. \'Qualls\' was just a different way of saying ‘walls.\' And black walls in the sense of what it means to be a young black male in America right now. A long time ago, black people weren’t even allowed to read. If you were caught reading, you’d get killed in front of your family. So growing up being black—we’re talking about a couple hundred years later—you learn to hide your wealth and knowledge. You put up these barriers, you protect yourself. It’s a reason you don’t necessarily feel okay—this baggage. It’s something to unlearn, at least in my opinion. But it also goes beyond just being black. It’s a people thing. There’s a lot of fearmongering out there. And it’s worse because of the internet. You gotta know who you are. It’s about this idea that it’s okay to be okay.\" **Miguel’s Happy Dance** \"Miguel Atwood-Ferguson plays keys on this record, and also worked on the string arrangement. Again, y’know, without getting too heavily into stuff, I had a rough couple of years. So you get Miguel’s happy dance.\" **How Sway** \"I like making music that’s a bit fast and challenging to play. So really, this is just that part of it—it’s like a little exercise.\" **Funny Thing** \"The love songs here are pretty self-explanatory. But I figure you’ve gotta be able to find the humor in stuff. You’ve gotta be able to laugh.\" **Overseas (feat. Zack Fox)** \"Brazil is the one place in the world I would move. São Paulo. I would just drink orange juice all day and play bass until I had nubs for fingers. So that’s number one. But man, you’ve also got Japan in there. Japan. And Russia! I mean, everything we know about the politics—it is what it is. But Russian people are awesome. They’re pretty crazy. But they’re awesome.\" **Dragonball Durag** \"The durag is the ultimate power move. Not like a superpower, but just—you know, it translates into the world. You’ve got people with durags, and you’ve got people without them. Personally, I always carry one. Man, you ever see that picture of David Beckham wearing a durag and shaking Prince Charles’ hand? Victoria’s looking like she wants to rip his pants off.\" **How I Feel** \"A song like \'How I Feel’—there’s not a lot of hidden meaning there \[*laughs*\]. It’s not like something really bad happened to me when I was watching *Care Bears* when I was six and I’m trying to cover it up in a song. But I did watch *Care Bears*.\" **King of the Hill** \"This is something I made with BADBADNOTGOOD. It came out a little while ago, on the Brainfeeder 10-year compilation. We kind of wrestled with whether or not it should go on the album, but in the end it felt right. You’re always trying to find space and time to collaborate with people, but you’re in one city, they’re in another, you’re moving around. Here, we finally got the opportunity to be in the same room together and we jumped at it. I try and be open to all kinds of collaboration, though. Magic is magic.\" **Unrequited Love** \"You know how relationships go: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose \[*laughs*\]. But really, it’s not funny \[*more laughs*\]. Sometimes you—\[*laughing*\]—you get your heart broken.\" **Fair Chance (feat. Ty Dolla $ign & Lil B)** \"Me and Ty spend a lot of time together. Lil B was more of a reach, but we wanted to find a way to make it work, because some people, you know, you just resonate with. This is definitely the beginning of more between him and I. A starting point. But you know, to be honest it’s an unfortunate set of circumstances under which it comes. We were all very close to Mac \[Miller\]. It was a moment for all of us. We all became very aware of that closeness in that moment.\" **Existential Dread** \"You know, getting older \[*laughs*\].\" **It Is What It Is** \"That’s me in the middle, saying, ‘Hey, Mac.’ That’s me, getting a chance to say goodbye to my friend.\"

GRAMMYs 2021 Winner - Best Progressive R&B Album Thundercat has released his new album “It Is What It Is” on Brainfeeder Records. The album, produced by Flying Lotus and Thundercat, features musical contributions from Ty Dolla $ign, Childish Gambino, Lil B, Kamasi Washington, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, BADBADNOTGOOD, Louis Cole and Zack Fox. “It Is What It Is” has been nominated for a GRAMMY in the Best Progressive R&B Category and with Flying Lotus also receiving a nomination in the Producer of the Year (Non-Classical). “It Is What It Is” follows his game-changing third album “Drunk” (2017). That record completed his transition from virtuoso bassist to bonafide star and cemented his reputation as a unique voice that transcends genre. “This album is about love, loss, life and the ups and downs that come with that,” Bruner says about “It Is What It Is”. “It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but at different points in life you come across places that you don’t necessarily understand… some things just aren’t meant to be understood.” The tragic passing of his friend Mac Miller in September 2018 had a profound effect on Thundercat and the making of “It Is What It Is”. “Losing Mac was extremely difficult,” he explains. “I had to take that pain in and learn from it and grow from it. It sobered me up… it shook the ground for all of us in the artist community.” The unruly bounce of new single ‘Black Qualls’ is classic Thundercat, teaming up with Steve Lacy (The Internet) and Funk icon Steve Arrington (Slave). It’s another example of Stephen Lee Bruner’s desire to highlight the lineage of his music and pay his respects to the musicians who inspired him. Discovering Arrington’s output in his late teens, Bruner says he fell in love with his music immediately: “The tone of the bass, the way his stuff feels and moves, it resonated through my whole body.” ‘Black Qualls’ emerged from writing sessions with Lacy, whom Thundercat describes as “the physical incarnate of the Ohio Players in one person - he genuinely is a funky ass dude”. It references what it means to be a black American with a young mindset: “What it feels like to be in this position right now… the weird ins and outs, we’re talking about those feelings…” Thundercat revisits established partnerships with Kamasi Washington, Louis Cole, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Ronald Bruner Jr and Dennis Hamm on “It Is What Is Is” but there are new faces too: Childish Gambino, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, plus Ty Dolla $ign and Lil B on ‘Fair Chance’ - a song explicitly about his friend Mac Miller’s passing. The aptly titled ‘I Love Louis Cole’ is another standout - “Louis Cole is a brush of genius. He creates so purely,” says Thundercat. “He makes challenging music: harmony-wise, melody-wise and tempo-wise but still finds a way for it to be beautiful and palatable.” Elsewhere on the album, ‘Dragonball Durag’ exemplifies both Thundercat’s love of humour in music and indeed his passion for the cult Japanese animé. “I have a Dragon Ball tattoo… it runs everything. There is a saying that Dragon Ball runs life,” he explains. “The durag is a superpower, to turn your swag on. It does something… it changes you,” he says smiling. Thundercat’s music starts on his couch at home: “It’s just me, the bass and the computer”. Nevertheless, referring to the spiritual connection that he shares with his longtime writing and production partner Flying Lotus, Bruner describes his friend as “the other half of my brain”. “I wouldn’t be the artist I am if Lotus wasn’t there,” he says. “He taught me… he saw me as an artist and he encouraged it. No matter the life changes, that’s my partner. We are always thinking of pushing in different ways.” Comedy is an integral part of Thundercat’s personality. “If you can’t laugh at this stuff you might as well not be here,” he muses. He seems to be magnetically drawn to comedians from Zack Fox (with whom he collaborates regularly) to Dave Chappelle, Eric Andre and Hannibal Buress whom he counts as friends. “Every comedian wants to be a musician and every musician wants to be a comedian,” he says. “And every good musician is really funny, for the most part.” It’s the juxtaposition, or the meeting point, between the laughter and the pain that is striking listening to “It Is What It Is”: it really is all-encompassing. “The thing that really becomes a bit transcendent in the laugh is when it goes in between how you really feel,” Bruner says. “You’re hoping people understand it, but you don’t even understand how it’s so funny ‘cos it hurts sometimes.” Thundercat forms a cornerstone of the Brainfeeder label; he released “The Golden Age of Apocalypse” (2011), “Apocalypse” (2013), followed by EP “The Beyond / Where The Giants Roam” featuring the modern classic ‘Them Changes’. He was later “at the creative epicenter” (per Rolling Stone) of the 21st century’s most influential hip-hop album Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp A Butterfly”, where he won a Grammy for his collaboration on the track ‘These Walls’ before releasing his third album “Drunk” in 2017. In 2018 Thundercat and Flying Lotus composed an original score for an episode of Golden Globe and Emmy award winning TV series “Atlanta” (created and written by Donald Glover).

=== ORDER NOW! === on I, VOIDHAGER Records : metalodyssey.8merch.com 3xLP TRIFOLD SLEEVE (incl. Bandcamp Digital Download and Streaming) • Colors vinyls (marble or color in color) / black • Deluxe 6-Panel vinyl gatefold • Limited to 300 copies • Poster 3xCD DIGIPACK (incl. Bandcamp Digital Download and Streaming) • Limited to 300 copies • Deluxe 8-Panel Digipack CD • Booklet _________________________ Belgium's NEPTUNIAN MAXIMALISM (aka NNMM) is a community of “cultural engineers” with a variable line-up, mixing drone metal with spiritual free jazz and psychedelic music. The project was initiated in 2018 by multi-instrumentalist Guillaume Cazalet (Czlt, Jenny Torse, Aksu), who brought together veteran saxophonist Jean Jacques Duerinckx (Ze Zorgs) and two drummers, Sebastien Schmit (K-Branding) and Pierre Arese (Aksu). In 2020, Stephane FDL and Lukas Bouchenot took the drums. Reshma Goolamy (bass), Romain Martini (guitar), Alice Thiel (synths, guitar), Joaquin Bermudez (saz, setar), Didié Nietzche (soundscapes) joined in 2019, thus changing the band into a real drone orchestra. By exploring the evolution of the human species, NEPTUNIAN MAXMALISM question the future of the living on Earth, propitiating a feeling of acceptance for the conclusion of the so called "anthropocene" era and preparing us for the incoming “probocene” era, imagining our planet ruled by superior intelligent elephants after the end of humanity. As Guillaume Cazalet explains, “for certain scientists, if we hadn't rule the Earth, elephants were supposed to be at the top of the pyramid of terrestrial life.” The ambitious album trilogy of “Éons” is a musical experience of gargantuan proportions where each chapter is part of a fascinating ritual, a cosmic mass of light and darkness recalling the works of SUNN O))), EARTH, ALUK TODOLO, ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE, SWANS, MOTORPSYCHO, SUN RA and the late JOHN COLTRANE. The intoxicating bacchanal starts with “To The Earth (Aker Hu Benben)”, a heavy tribal music affair influenced by stoner metal, noise rock and free jazz. “It's a balance between sacred and profane, and resumes lots of human feelings or their consequences, such as love, war, hate, ritual dance, transmutation, strength, feminine/masculine juxtaposition, etc,”, says Cazalet. With “To The Moon (Heka Khaibit Sekhem)” the band opts for a slightly different approach, surrealistic yet brutal, occasionally steering towards black-doom metal. Cazalet: “Here the rhythm section plays an important role, fueled by an obscure power that plunges the listener into a magic, occult trance; this album is characterized by shamanic invocations and summonings of the ancients by using animal-like growls and the homo-sapiens' proto-language as reconstructed by Pierre Lanchantin, an English researcher/archeologist from the University of Cambridge.” The third and final chapter encompasses the interstellar meditations of “To The Sun (Ânkh Maât Sia)”, described by Cazalet as a solar drone opera: “We worked on the power of frequencies and tonality, chthonian deep vibrations and iridescent high lights by using huge amplified baritone sax and guitars, spectral soundscapes, antic cinematographic views and tribal percussions.” Wrapped in a phantasmagoric painting by Japanese master Kaneko Tomiyuki, NEPTUNIAN MAXIMALISM's “Éons” is with no doubt the quintessential mystical and psychedelic journey of 2020. 𓁹♆𓁹

'Dialectic Soul', the debut LP from drummer Asher Gamedze is now up for pre-order. 5*, 'Incredible' and 'LP of the Year' reviews are already arriving. Robin D.G. Kelley wrote that "it will render you completely incapacitated for the rest of the day. It's a piece of music that you'll not forget". Asher introduces the themes that constitute the album; free drums representing autonomous African motion, the saxophone reflecting deeply & honestly on the violence of colonialism. The teachings of Coltrane, Biko, Makeba, Malcom & others inspire the music's positive manifestation of resistance. "Fundamentally, it is about the reclamation of the historical imperative. It is about the dialect of the soul & the spirit while it moves through history. The soul is dialectic. Motion is imperative. We keep moving." The Limited Pre-Order, including numbered art prints sold-out with the release of 'state of emergence' EP release. The pre-order for the Ltd double LP / CD is available now [150 copies on Bandcamp].

The most surprising thing about Tricky’s 14th album isn’t how dark it is (Tricky fans are used to the darkness by now), but how to the point. These are short songs, most under three minutes. And while his landmark albums had a dense, phantasmagoric quality, *Fall to Pieces* is clean and stripped down. The moods are still liminal: “Hate This Pain” sounds like someone murmuring through a nightmare, “Running Off” like someone trying to remember a strange old nursery rhyme. (His newest collaborator, vocalist Marta Złakowska, is perfect—eerie and innocent and seductive all at once.) But in the clarity of the sound lies a challenge: He might make the pain pretty (“I’m in the Doorway”) or even danceable (“Fall Please”), but he doesn’t let you settle into it. He’s always been a blues musician at heart, just visionary enough to avoid the blues per se. *Fall to Pieces* is his lonesome motel confession.

Tree Time is a reflection on the derelict Tottenham garden, now a forest, next door to me, full of sycamores, holly, walnut, horse chestnut, hazel, elder, jasmine and ivy where the birds nest and the bees go for nectar, and the squirrels chase and chatter along their aerial runways. Underground in the root system a family of foxes dig out their tunnels and palaces. During this time of pandemic lockdown, I have been fortunate to have time to listen to the wind soughing in the trees, and get drawn into a different time dimension - the trees speak slowly and ponderously, over centuries, rooting down to the memories that are stored in their fibrous trunks. There is a huge canopy of Russian Vine at one end, and every year it advances further into my garden until I deal with it. I used some of this vine along with other small branches - beech, ash and sycamore, to make sound, using a violin bow to bring out their resonant qualities. They behave like something between a string and a tongue of wood, then in real time I processed the sounds using simple guitar pedals - delay, pitch-shift and looper. The tracks are all improvised and edited, but no overdubbing.