New Dada Music_2024: Fave BklynSounds + OtherSounds (mid-year edition)

List: words and links about great rhythm-improvisation-community music local to New York City, and other notable recordings from around the world.

Happy opening Sunday of the latter half of 2024! Below you’ll find a list of my favorite recordings of the past half-year—one part of it annotated and focused on local artists/projects, the other part a listicle with links to other new albums, mixes and songs in regular rotation at House of Dada. New Dada Music has been an occasional post rounding-up stuff I’ve been listening to, consisting of edited/expanded reviews regularly published on Dada Strain’s Substack Notes and in IG stories, and maybe some additional words and thoughts. But it hasn’t appeared since late 2023.

I previously tried doing these round-ups monthly, and then bi-monthly, but I’ll be honest: I am having trouble with albums and singles and releases at the moment, with the whole system of musical capitalization. And I know the main problem is me…kinda.

It’s not like there’s a dearth of material. Quite the opposite. I listen to music for at least half of my waking hours, so I listen to a lot of new recordings, and especially, to new music, and enjoy a large chunk of what I choose to press play on. So many of these finished recordings and compositions are musicians refracting the world, and helping make sense of the horror and the beauty, and helping listeners make sense of it. And I will of course continue to listen—and, when I can or have the time+energy, to write about them—because to always be listening is central to the rhythm, improvisation, community ideal at the center of this projection.

Yet the question I have been increasingly asking myself is, “listening where?” Because at some point, it became clear to me that what constitutes the core of Dada Strain’s desire to engage with the sound world, is less about perfected recordings for private consumption, than public live presentation, those of-the-moment accidents (intentional or not) that happen when musicians are locked into their craft and audiences provide the instant energy, when all the parts of the social community come together. To paraphrase Amirtha Kidambi from our interview of a few weeks ago, it’s hard to capture ceremony on tape.

This not the fault of the musician or the tape, but the perspective of the listener; and 20 months of constantly covering live music, this is where my perspective has brought me. Keep all that in mind, when/if reading the below.

Thank you for reading, listening, following and supporting. Please share and subscribe to Dada Strain—or upgrade your subscription. And please support your local musicians and musickers, independent venues, arts organizations and community broadcasters. They/We need it now more than ever.

Fave 2024 BklynSounds:

Afrikan Sciences, .5x100Rf(est.1974) (self-released) - I’d been out of touch with the work of Eric Porter (aka Afrikan Sciences) for a few years before hearing his transcendent set at Shara Lunon’s Heavy Florals series last Novemeber. I’d always thought of him as West Coast, so imagine my surprise to learn that Porter was born in Bklyn, had returned to the city a few years back, and was cranking out exceptional electronic productions at a steady clip. (His Bandcamp page overfloweth.) Afrikan Sciences’ 5x100Rf(est.1974), one of at least two releases Porter’s dropped in 2024, is a heady set of 14 solo pieces creating a live machine jazz, with layers of instruments, found-sound and MPC’d broken beats, and occasional beatless ambiance, rising together at the intersection of composition and improvisation. As a collection, it’s not far from Chief Adjuah’s recent work, or Flying Lotus and Four Tet’s oeuvres, beautiful poetic, emotional and funky in a post-techno way.

Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones, New Monuments (We Jazz) - 2024’s best punk-jazz album is also its best prog-jazz album, and its most unabashed political jazz album. Elder Ones has been vocalist/keyboardist Kidambi’s most direct venue for expressing rage about a world on fire. And New Monuments, the project’s third album, coalesces various issues (BLM summer, anti-Asian hate crimes, Indian farm reforms, Iranian women’s movement), elevates the songwriting and playing (Matt Nelson on soprano saxophone, Lester St. Louis on cello, Eva Lawitts on bass, Jason Nazary on drums, everyone on electronics and synths, all on 🔥), and pulls off a broad-minded delivery of music+message in a way Elder Ones haven’t previously mustered. Though the four tracks each span between 8-14 minutes, there’s a ceaseless intensity to this multi-part music, runway builds and explosions. Kidambi’s harmonium provides the central drone, the rhythm section bashes away like the rally is a pogo meet, and Amirtha’s vocals, whose vehement improvisational style scares and draws in by equal measure, ratchets up the intensity.

Arooj Aftab, Night Reign (Verve) - Aftab’s proper major-label solo debut is a simmering, sensual wonder, the rare big-sounding album where one not only hears the budget at work, but recognizes the creative expansion, marveling that big cultural capital can still get things occasionally right. Night Reign sounds a continuation of Aftab’s flair: torch-like folk songs, often in Urdu, some original, some covers, some new reworks based on existing texts, given laid-back intense reads, with exceptional musicianship, and Arooj’s voice and ear unmistakably centered. It’s full of mystery, especially for the linguistically challenged, but its melodic beauty, never sugar-coated, always demanding, transcends language and musical cultures in ways that seem obvious. (For those who still need coaxing, a trio of songs, as well as a Moor Mother verse, are full of familiar words, driving the points home.) Lynnée Denise’s poetic liner notes describe Night Reign as “a narrative of uplifting surrender,” “an act of tender defiance,” “protest and prayer,” where I hear devotion and quiet confrontation. However you cut it, love and war are at gorgeously rendered stake here.

brainwave research center, feel free (self-released) - Third album from Chase Smith and Christa Majoras’ analog-synths beat project is my favorite of the bunch because the music is getting harder and harder to pin down. The airy, sequencer tunnel-vision of kosmische explorers, the teeth-grinding textures of industrial punks, the compositional abstraction of the Bleep age, and, yes, even something approaching “techno” (the leftfield kind) for dancing, all present in fairly conventional (read: >5mins) environments. But Majoras and Smith don’t devote individual pieces to single directions; they layer and pile on their desires for the machines to be many things at once, never leaving well-enough alone, with a constant aggressive streak. The wide world of synth-patch fetishists and new age-ists should heed their call.

Caroline Davis & Wendy Eisenberg, Accept When (Astral Spirits) - A duo debut that falls somewhere between folk-pop and fusion-jazz sounds about right for Davis and Eisenberg. Prolly best recognized as, respectively, an alto saxophonist and a guitarist, each is also a magnificent song stylist, whose own compositions push at the notions of what harmony could convey while remaining “experimental” in a general listener’s ear. This is especially true of the material that features Eisenberg’s singing lead, often paired with Davis’ own voice, which is like a wonderful new take on what a standard can be. There’s also naturally twisting alto+guitar duet lines that feel like falling into a sonic rabbit hole, but not one where you get hopelessly lost (well, maybe “Slynx”), but the kind in which you keep finding familiar parts put to new uses when combined. Writing about Accept When, the often astute Peter Margasak invoked Brian Wilson which, context aside, is right on the money.

Ches Smith, Laugh Ash (Pyroclastic) - Drummer Smith is one of the most diversely minded musicians working in NYC, a heavy backbeat guy who came up with the kitchen-sink art-noise-punk-fusion West Coast scene (maybe why he’s massive accompanying electric guitarists), but also deeply into voudou drumming and electronic rhythms. On Laugh Ash, the sound of machines is the initial magnet, but how they’re integrated into a magnificently odd-sounding all-star big band that includes occasional spoken narratives from Shara Lunon, is what makes it bloom. Genre is nowhere to be found, but a contemporary psychedelicized global groove with occasional heavy jazz overtones (James Brandon Lewis blowing) speaks to the goings-on. One of those albums I want to play for discerning listeners of difficult music, to prove that some of it can be catchy as hell.

DJ Wawa, “Zaha” (Toucan Sounds) - I won’t lie: I am a sucker for a tune that lionizes a footballer who is a master to the attentive but just another “soccer-ball player’ for the heathens. Wilfried Zaha is an Ivorian-English attacker, long of London’s Crystal Palace, an exquisite player who I long coveted at Arsenal. “Zaha” is also the subject of DJ Wawa’s overdue return to dance-track production, a playful piece of melodic techno work, whose stuttering layers of keys and drum-machine percussion, mirror the good-time flair. I can’t tell you why I love it, but it’s among my tracks of the year thus far.

Luke Stewart Silt Trio, Unknown Rivers (Pi) - Not 100% applicable to the Bklyn Sounds list as opposed to the one below, because though bassist Stewart is a behemoth in Bklyn’s DIY improvised music community, his roots with this music lie in D.C., and Silt Trio (with tenor saxophonist Brian Settles and drummer Trae Crudup) is by all intents-and-purposes the Capital’s bop. Yet the group’s second (?) full-length is for Bklyn’s Pi Recordings, features three tracks with the inimitable Chad Taylor spelling Crudup, and the groove it continuously calls forth feels of a piece with what Luke brings to the sound of our city, and throughout his Eastern seaboard collaborations. Make no mistake, Unknown Rivers is a record of groove tunes, wide open but insistent, with Settles magnificent in long, minimal lines with a familiar tone that harkens to legendary freedom-minded tenor players in contexts that update the ancients. A classic tenor trio album made now — that you can DJ the sh*t out of.

musclecars, Sugar Honey Iced Tea! (BBE) - Regular readers know the high-esteem in which I hold Brandon Weems and Craig Handfield. The DJ/production duo is near the center of most community dance stuff in Bklyn, and this long-awaited debut full-length pushes the local argument of “can house be now?” even further towards YES! Sure, it throws back to classics, but its mentality and context is the post-2020 weariness and struggle that tries to build towards a positive resolution. Or as positive as you can be with genocide and the great unraveling. If the lyrical directions early in the album — touching on spirituality, and modern urban life ennui (especially the burdens of capitalism + patriarchy) — are more clarity of direction than deep insight; the latter half is as perfect as psychedelic jazz-house gets. Open spaces meet lush instrumental passages and builds worthy of Charles Stepney and Joe Clausell, propelled by minimal, globally-minded drum-machines. And in the Toribio-sung “Circles II,” it contains a tentative love-song worthy of the moment’s trepidation.

sinonó, la espalda y su punto radiante (Subtext) - Throughout the early part of 2024, this poetic debut by the voice+strings+electronics trio of isabel crespo pardo, Henry Fraser and Lester St. Louis, has been my comfort music. Which maybe speaks to the soft dark intense shape of what’s passing for “comfort” nowadays. Next to Henry and Lester’s gothic cello and musically centralized bass, crespo’s delicate delivery of folk poetry amidst almost-stop-start vocal rhythms create an atmosphere I’ve never really experienced before. A kind of expressionist fado, middle-of-the-night music, comfortable in the deep surrounding darkness, but also an “offering” that bends towards an oncoming light without betraying that it really is coming. I have little doubt that this radiante one will go down in history, one way or another.

STEFA*, Born With an Extra Rib (Figure & Ground) - Queens-born stefa marin alarcón is a “genderless” and “genreless” artist with a massive range. They are as comfortable gorgeously deconstructing love songs with only a keyboard and some vocal loops, as fronting an electronics-heavy punk band, as playing on-stage foil in Xenia Rubinos’ propulsive, conceptual live show. Born With an Extra Rib is STEFA*’s full-length debut, moving in numerous directions at once. The album’s secret weapon is alarcón’s songwriting, which continually leans into all this sonic diversity, while autobiographically exposing themselves not merely as a statement of social identity but of artistic intent. There are, for instance, many worlds between the percussive industrial fervor of “Costillas” the jazz groove of “negra, revisited,” and the anthemic yearning of “3COSAS!,” but aided by a handful of exceptional Bklyn/Queens musicians, they feel of a piece and universal. If many of the other artists on this list are consciously embellishing the margins, STEFA* sounds ready for the bright lights.

Stephan Crump, Slow Water (Papillon Sounds) - I first encountered jazz bassist Crump as one of Vijay Iyer’s regular collaborators in the early ‘00s, and long regarded him as a talented member of New York’s sonic left-fielders. Listening of-late, it’s easier to recognize specifics: that the folks Crump plays with regularly (Mary Halvorson, Kris Davis, Liberty Ellman) often pursue creative music whose harmonies and textures veer away from straight-ahead statements, towards chamber sound clusters (lotsa types of brass and strings, empty spaces), harnessing high- and mid-ranges of their instrumental pairings towards ideas of pastoral and ambient beauty. Slow Water does all that. Recorded with an all-star sextet — Patricia Brennan (vibraphone), Joanna Mattrey (viola), yuniya edi kwon (violin), Jacob Garchik (trombone) and Kenny Warren (trumpet) — it is a paean to the power of water, apparently based on Erica Gies' 2022 book, Water Always Wins, translated into musical form. It sounds like a European concert-hall work, but not reliant on bombastic turns of sound, but a small expertly improvising ensemble’s dedication to untying harmonic knots. Wonderful pieces of music, that can nod towards the blues and Satie, but always hold their own.

VA, IYKYK (Air Texture) - Few types of LPs are as important to community musicking as a good compilation, one that illustrates broader timely points, creating introductions and connections. IYKYK, 17 tracks of minimalist electronic dance music compiled by Bklyn DJ/booker 4 AM NYC and LA-based DJ Varsha, champions productions by “femme & nonbinary talent.” Yet it’s also a survey of a particular kind of Bklyn sound. Even when contributors aren’t NYC-based (there’s strong reps here from West Coast, Detroit, Philly, Japan), IYKYK projects how the city’s internationalism and localizations work together. This isn’t about new or experimental, but the depth that established sounds like “house” or “dub” or “lo-fi” or “club” still possess. Stand-out originals by established greats (LadyMonix, Russell E.L. Butler, Gavilán Rayna Russom) and rising stars (Tammy Lakkis, 4AM NYC, JIANGLING), are interspersed with names either new to me (Connecticut psychedelic ambient-house producer Moon Rhythms) or new to production (the ghetto-house-flavored futurism of Bklyn’s theoretic). You can prolly rock IYKYK out, but it’s first and foremost an excellent home-listening trip, and a sign-post: press play for directions.

VA, RESIST COLONIAL POWER BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY (PTP) - Geng, the Queens-based producer/DJ behind NYC’s great PTP/Purple Tape Pedigree/Power Through People/Protect the Peace label, regards the ethical music underground as more aligned than fractured. (The communion with Dada Strain is natural.) Resist Colonial Power By Any Means Necessary, a sprawling (92 original trax) Geng-compiled survey of the rhythm-improvisation-composition community circa:now, is a benefit album for Gaza and Haiti support groups. Its sonic breadth and purpose already make it special. Its performances make it essential. If you use RESIST COLONIAL POWER as nothing more than a map of the sonic future, you will be in good hands.

Fave 2024 OtherSounds:

Abdullah Ibrahim, 3 (Gearbox) // Ahmed, Wood Blues (Astral Spirits) // Alice Coltrane, Live at Carnegie Hall 1971 (Impulse!) // Ariana Grande, “yes, and?” (Republic) // August Fanon, 1+1 (mixtape) // Baby Rose & BadBadNotGood, Slow Burn EP (Secretly Canadian) // Bosq & Kaleta, No Be Today (Bacalao) // Bruno Berle, No Reino Dos Afetos 2 (Far Out Recordings/Psychic Hotline) // Chappell Roan, “Good Luck, Babe!” (Island) // Charlie XCX, Brat (RCA) // Deon Jamar, Altars (Black Music) // DJ Nigga Fox, Chá Preto (Príncipe) // Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, Souvenirs (Mississippi Records) // Fivio Foreign (feat 41), “Get Deady” (Columbia) // Four Tet, Three (Text) // House of Hits, Work That EP (Frizner Electric) // Ibaaku, Joola Jazz (Blanc Manioc) // Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly, MESTIZX (International Anthem) // Isaiah Collier & Chosen Few, The Almighty (Division 81) // Jack Cardigan Orchestra & Joseph Matick, Western Pink (Velvet Bikini) // Joy Guidry, AMEN (Whited Sepulchre) // JLin, Akoma (Planet Mu) // Kelly G & Candi Staton, “Power of One” (Glitterbox) // Kendrick Lamar, “euphoria” (self-release) // Kim Gordon, The Collective (Matador) // Les Amazones d'Afrique (feat. Mamani Keïta & Fafa Ruffino), "Flaws" (Real World) // Los Hermanos Detroit (feat. Ian O’Brien), “Family” (Mother Tongue) // Meshell Ndegeocello, Red Hot + Ra: The Magic City (Red Hot) // Nicola Conte x Joe Claussell, Umoja (Joaquin Joe Claussell Sacred Rhythm Music & Cosmic Arts Remixes) (Far Out Recordings) // NKISI, The Altar EP (Cortizona) // Nsasi, Coinage (Hakuna Kulala) // Oluko Imo, Glory of OM (Soundway reissue, orig. 1994) // Sabrina Carpenter, “Espresso” (Island) // Seafood Sam, Standing on Giant Shoulders (drink sum wtr) // Syclops, Black Eye (BubbleTease Communications) // Thandiswa, “emini” (King Tha/Universal) // Tierra Whack, World Wide Whack (Interscope) // Use Knife, Peace Carnival (Morphine Records) // Wave Arising, (The) Rooted Sky (Ransom Note) // VA, Ghana Special 2: Electronic Highlife & Afro Sounds In The Diaspora, 1980​-​93 (Soundway)