Saturday Night Traxx_022721
New Music: Calibre & DRS & Mark Ernestus, Moses Boyd & Katy B, Gerald Mitchell, Jimi Tenor & Freestyle Man, Duke Hugh, Moonilena, MSM.DE94, Sun Ra, Billy Lo & Kai Alce
“Around the world, around the world.” Yeah, I’m a little sad that the one robot blew up the other. But the world keeps turning, and the year without dance keeps presenting us with small miracles, or just reasons to keep going and look forward to finding each other out there again. I look forward to that.
Basic Channel / Rhythm & Sound Alert! I’m not enough a drum’n’bass head to know much about Calibre & DRS except that I’ve been seeing their names around for a long long time. (And their discographies sorta prove that.) Mark Ernestus’ various werks, on the other hand, have been sonic cornerstones of my world since I first heard the Paperclip People remix and the Rhythm & Sound/Paul St. Hilaire work in the late ‘90s. “Bad” is one of two tracks that Berlin dub’s co-founding father worked on with the d&b duo, and IMO the deeper one. It’s the bass monolith you’d expect it to be, but with glimmers of clarinet (or melodica?) popping up throughout, for a whiff of Augustus Pablo invocation. “Bad” neither invents nor reinvents nothing. Many of you may even not give a shit, but in a world now filled with dub techno filters galore, hearing this reduces the majority of similar music to rubble.
Fun story: the second time I worked at MTV (running a short-term “Pitchfork competitor” called MTV Hive), we started a new-artist live-concert series at Webster Hall Studio; and one of the few shows I got to initiate and produce before being unceremoniously shit-canned was Katy B’s live U.S. debut in September 2011. It was, in a word, “glorious.” (“Katy on a Mission” - holy sh*t, what a chorus…still!) It’s sad to not hear much music from Katy nowadays (anyone know why?), but her jump onto this new Vocal Mix of “2 Far Gone,” a stand-out track from Moses Boyd’s great 2020 LP Dark Matter, is magnificent. UK garage dub vibes-meets-LDN jazz magnificence, with a (presuming) Joe Armon-Jones piano intro, and cross-current bassline. And Katy makes it sound like the wondrous R&B pop it very much is.
More “Gerald Mitchell on a P-Funk” vibe, this time aided by his brother Thornell, with whom he once shared time in the ‘80s Detroit group Painted Phunk. The epic “Metamorphosis of Twookie Wonder Brown” is a direct follow-up to Gerald’s fantastic Celebrity BBQ Sauce LP dropped in November (a variation of its title track is the b-side), a humorous slice of spoken word, and throbbing funk single-mindedness (think “Hydraulic Pump”). Thornell tells the story of a smartie-pants toucan named Twookie who wants to dance like James Brown and sing like Stevie Wonder, as the band—Gerald, aided by guitarist Maurice Herd and drummer Marc Anthony—lock the f*ck in for nearly a quarter of an hour. Tight and masterful.
Musically speaking, Jimi Tenor had a pretty incredible 2020, moving between a deeply underrated house LP with Maurice Fulton and a space-age Afro-jazz-funk solo record made with a bunch of Scandinavian, German and Ghanaian musicians. “Forgotten Planet Awakens,” his first music of the new year, is a collaboration with semi-regular Finnish partner Freestyle Man for Stockholm’s beloved-by-many Studio Barnhus label; and it mixes the two vibes into an eccentric wonder that befits the outer limits of Tenor’s creative personality. There’s the synthetic funk-house bassline that outlines the parameters of what we’re doing here, and then there are the voices of an astral chorus, an occasional flute and strings-like keys, all of which seemingly emanate from a reproduction of a soundtrack to an experimental ‘60s film, and provide the unique character. Psychedelic house oddballs unite.
Rhythm Section’s man in Groningen, Holland Duke Hugh is a multi-instrumentalist making lovely jazz-oriented dance records that fit snugly next to Sound Signature productions. His new EP Common Ground has a lot of that laid-back future-soul vibe without ever turning obvious. “Got My 606 Back” is right at the center of the record’s proceedings, layers of minimal synth and keyboard lines calling and responding to one another, wrapping themselves around a taut bassline. There’s one melodic thread (a Juno 60?) that acts almost like a scat vocalist throughout, a focal point. The kind of “house track” I could—and, in fact, would love to—hear a quartet turn into a “composition.”
Moonilena is young Swedish music producer and visual artist Marlena Lampinen, whose new EP on Glasgow’s Huntleys + Palmers is only her second or third overall release—and the first solo. It’s kind of a stunner, a beat-wise, experimental record not really beholden to dance music, but always moving with off-kilter rhythms, and flowing full of folk melodies played on keys and synths, trying to figure out its purpose in a variety of small focused ways. “Rose Quartz” is the EP’s most forceful piece, an instrumental rock song constructed on an old Farfisa-sounding keyboard line, a massive kick-drum, and three chiming chords which could be played on a guitar but aren’t. The entirety of the “song” is a rising build, something that could be by Union Carbide Productions (or, more likely, a solo track by one of its better minds, Björn Olsson). Not sure where she goes from here, but this is a simple wonder.
I highly recommend giving pretty much every compilation/mixtape from South Africa that arrives on the recommendation of a trusted source at least a cursory spin. The country’s overlapping music cultures—so-called “jazz,” the melodies and vocals of the numerous indigenous traditions, global dance musics and technologies—have always been mixed together here, rooted but unwilling to stand still. It is, for my money, among the world’s great music cultures. Just Move is a pretty good Joburg label I initially discovered because Detroit’s Rick Wade put out records with ‘em, and following it on Bandcamp has never been a waste of time—even if the default house music they release often veers towards the smooth cosmopolitan sound of hotel rooftops. Though a lot of it has deeper levels. MSM.DE94 (born: Nqubeko Dlamini), a producer from KwaZulu-Natal, is a name that was until recently new to me; “Jazzling,” a track whose title gives away its headspace (while sampling a woman’s narration about her creative influences), shows him to be a young dub-jazz-house fusioneer of the top order. (There are a couple of other excellent tracks on the Take a Breath, Vol. 3 sampler that it’s culled from.)
Saturn Alert! I’ve recently spent a lot of time in the Arkestral archives, literally writing up too many Sun Ra records to mention. And while the delight in being introduced to hours of music by one of the 20th century’s greatest artists transported me to many different edges (Ra is nothing if not multi-directional), the most joyful moment was discovering the dance-floor bomb that is “UFO.” A 1979 disco-funk charger co-written by electric bassist Steve Clarke and guitarist Taylor Richardson, it combines astral travel, one of the great man’s favorite themes, with notions of transcendence through movement; while marrying a pure boogie to something more musically ornery, in both Richardson’s skronky electric guitar and the angles with which Arkestra horns play Philly soul charts. If they had it, Mancuso and Levan must have cane’d this song in their respective disco temples. You will undoubtedly hear me play it soon.
Another jazz-oriented oldie revived. Kai Alce brings back Billy Lo’s 2002 deep house Detroit nugget “It’s the Life” and fully reconstitutes it for another sonic world. Where the original featured the vocals of Billy Love (recently a partner on Gerald Mitchell’s Celebrity BBQ Sauce) and Kamila Hassan, deep in a philosophical discourse about how to stay together or stay apart, Kai’s remix backgrounds and dubs out their voices, and calls forth a trumpet and then a vibraphone to solo over the warm open chords. It’s a track that radiates a late-night, melancholy energy, but at it’s core also contains a way to move past itself. This one feels like it could everywhere in the Next Times.