What lies between water and the shore? Slipping inside the crevice of a dream, taking her title from a Korean term which encompasses everything from idle fantasies to intrepid night terrors, on her sophomore album Lucy Liyou swaps molten piano instrumentals and text-to-speech snippets for a staccato of saliva sounds and a more fulsome embrace of pansori, a genre of musical theatre performed by a singer and a drummer which emphasises the trials and tribulations of character within a national ethos of repressed sorrow or collective grief. Presaging the romance of ‘Fold The Horse’ and the woozy drama of ‘April In Paris’, an interpretation of the Vernon Duke jazz standard which figures the cruellest month as one rife with possibilities while honing in on a cemetery in Philadelphia where the narrator reflects on the reiterating horror of sexual assault, on the title track the artist recalls a dream of drowning and being pulled to the shore by someone who they first thought was their mother, but turned out to be a close friend. Climaxing with a tongue-twister of gushing tenacity and operatic force, Liyou asks ‘Why can’t you depend on me? When I need someone to need me?’, blending the twin torments of self-abnegation and codependence with the languid irresoluteness of limpid desire and the conquering bounty of trust.
Processing period instruments with a glistening palatial grandeur, Markus Popp elaborates on a series of short vignettes which were originally produced for the grand opening of the German Romantic Museum in Frankfurt. Described as a ‘burning, seething cauldron, filled with dramatic light and colour’ by the modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe, the classically-trained artist and musicology scholar UCC Harlo regales the dry riverbeds of the Palo Duro Canyon with promises of light rain and ravishing glints from her baroque viola, on a poetic reflection of the drought she encountered on a cross-country trip through America which teases the nocturnal quenching of thirst. Steeped in the repertoire of the raga, Jasdeep Singh Degun takes the tender uplift of ‘Nadia’ to the Real World Studios in Wiltshire, and Gerald Cleaver lets us all eat over skittering beats and careening jazz squalls, before licking the plate clean on the centrepiece to his upcoming album ‘Cake’.
On their debut release as Naya Baaz, the guitarist and recent Guggenheim Fellow for composition Rez Abbasi pairs up with the sitar maestro Josh Feinberg, who specialises in the bends and glides of the Maihar Gharana style from northern India. Adding diminished melodies and harmonised chromatic lines to Abbasi’s fusion of trenchant grooves and jazz lyricism, for the three-part suite of Charm the duo are joined by Jennifer Vincent on the five-string cello and Satoshi Takeishi on his specially augmented drum set. The harpist Zeena Parkins, saxophonist Mette Rasmussen, and drummer Ryan Sawyer deliver their second album as Glass Triangle, hollowing out their instruments and assorted objects with reference to a hallucinogenic film by Josiah McElheny and Jeff Preiss.
Nowadays exploring the Western gaze, cultural minutiae, and the cultivation of imaginary identities as they relate to her lifelong fascination with China, back in seventies the poet and media artist Ellen Zweig was part of the pioneering Downtown scene in New York City, where she introduced and perfected a technique called the ‘human loop’ through which multiple performers repeated a single phrase, creating a sonic collage of syllabic waves which washed in and out of synchronisation. Collecting for the first time her key works from the period, which blend speculative spoken word with fourth world ambient minimalism, on ‘If Archimedes’ the poet amplifies the technique, telling with apocalyptic humour and ceaseless foreboding the story of Edith Warner, who lived near the Los Alamos National Laboratory during the development of the first atomic bomb.
From her home on the banks of the Rio Grande at the Otowi Bridge crossing, Warner opened a tea room where she sold Coca-Colas and her legendary chocolate cake to a steady stream of patrons including the laboratory director J. Robert Oppenheimer, who loved physics and the red desolation of the desert and found in Los Alamos a place where he could reconcile those two loves. Clanging alongside David Dunn on the junk percussion of the atomic artist Tony Price with vocal contributions from Nathanial Tarn and Joan La Barbara, tossing in a reversal of the immortal nectar of the Bhagavad Gita, Zweig juxtaposes the fates of Warner, Oppenheimer, and the Manhattan Project with the life and work of the Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes, who designed catapults and burning lenses to defend his city of Syracuse from the Romans only to be slain by an errant soldier, commenting obliquely on a barren future from the swirling confines of his bathtub.
The Psychic Ills keyboardist Brent Cordero and Sunwatchers bassist Peter Kerlin sublimate madness in the company of a stellar cast of collaborators, framed in the context of the ongoing struggle against racism, gentrification and displacement across Brooklyn and beyond. From a 40-minute improvisation performed ahead of a live recording by his psychedelic folk band Mask, the experimental noisemaker Mamer cuts what may be the first album for solo sherter, an ancient Kazakh instrument typically used as a tenor dombra with three strings, a shorter fretboard and fewer frets. Recorded in the Upper West Side apartment where he was raised, Curtis Stewart dedicates the twenty through-composed songs on of Love. to the memory of his mother, the violinist and educator Elektra Kurtis. Following collaborations with the Scottish smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul and sean-nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, the saxophonist Colin Stetson aerates with ancestral aplomb the billowing mass of When we were that what wept for the sea.
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UCC Harlo – ‘Riverbeds (Palo Duro)’
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Lucy Liyou – ‘Dog Dreams (개꿈)’
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Glass Triangle – ‘Glass Spell’
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马木尔 Mamer – ‘阔尔库特的库布孜 / Ⱪorⱪetteng ⱪobeze / The Kobyz of Korkut’
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Brent Cordero & Peter Kerlin – ‘White Supremacy In Black Face’
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Curtis Stewart – ‘Drift to Wake’
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Colin Stetson – ‘Safe with me’
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