MUSIC

“Let me fly you home. We can talk on the way”

Thorn Valley is a 20 song assemblage of various transmissions from the ever diffuse and widening DIY underground, released to mark the four year anniversary of World of Echo.

Available as a gatefold double LP pressed in an edition of 500.

Artwork by Matthew Walkerdine.

クレジット

New Zealand’s Marlon Williams has quite simply got one of the most extraordinary, effortlessly distinctive voices of his generation—a fact well known to fans of his first, self-titled solo album, and his captivating live shows. An otherworldly instrument with an affecting vibrato, it’s a voice that’s earned repeated comparisons to the great Roy Orbison, and even briefly had Williams, in his youth, consider a career in classical singing, before realizing his temperament was more Stratocaster than Stradivarius.

But it’s the art of songwriting that has bedeviled the artist, and into which he has grown exponentially on his second album, Make Way For Love, out in February of 2018. It’s Marlon Williams like you’ve never heard him before—exploring new musical terrain and revealing himself in an unprecedented way, in the wake of a fractured relationship.

Like any good New Zealander, Williams doesn’t boast or sugarcoat: songwriting is still not his favorite endeavor. “I mean, I find it ecstatic to finish a song,” he explains. “To have done one doesn’t feel like an accomplishment as much as a relief and maybe a curiosity, you know? To have come through to the other side and have something. But it certainly always feels messy.” In the past, his default approach to was storytelling. On 2015’s Marlon Williams, the musician took a cue from traditional folk and bluegrass, and wove dark, character-driven tales: “Hello Miss Lonesome”, “Strange Things” and “Dark Child”. But when it came to sharing his own life in song, he was more reticent. “I’ve always had this sort of hang up about putting too much of myself into my music,” he admits. “All of the projects I’ve ever been in, there was a conscientious effort to try and have this barrier between myself and the emotional crux of the music. I’ve loved writing characters into my songs, or at least pretending that it wasn’t me that it was about.”

Sensing that people wanted more Marlon from Marlon, on album number two he was determined to deliver. And while he’s still a firm believer in the art of cover songs—his live shows regularly feature covers of songs by artists ranging from Townes Van Zandt to Yoko Ono—Williams wanted the new record to be all original material. By the autumn of last year, with a recording deadline looming the following February, it was crunch time for the musician, a reflexive procrastinator. “I hadn’t written for two years!” he recalls. What was needed was a lyrical spark. A triggering event, perhaps. As it turns out, life delivered just that.

In early December, Williams and his longtime girlfriend, musician Aldous (Hannah) Harding, broke up—the end of a relationship that brought together two of Down Under’s most acclaimed talents of recent years, who’d managed to navigate the challenges of having equally ascendant—though separate—careers, until they couldn’t. While personally wrenching, the split seemed to open the floodgates for Williams as a writer. “Then I wrote about fifteen songs in a month,” he recalls. The biggest challenge? Condensing often complex, conflicted emotions and doing them justice. “Just narrowing the possibilities into a three-minute song makes me feel dirty”, he explains. Also, not making a breakup record that was too much of a downer. “I had a lot of good friends saying, ‘Don’t worry about sounding too sad,’” he says. “They were saying, ‘Just go with it.’”

Sure enough, while Make Way For Love draws on Williams’ own story, in remarkably universal terms it captures the vagaries of relationships that we’ve all been through: the bliss (opener “Come To Me”); ache (“Love Is a Terrible Thing”, a ballad that likens post-breakup emptiness to “a snowman melting in the spring”); nagging questions (“Can I Call You”, which wonders aloud what his ex is drinking, who she’s with, and if she’s happy); and bitterness (“The Fire Of Love”, whose lyrics Williams says he “agonized over” more than any).

On “Party Boy”, over an urgent, moody gallop that recalls his last album’s “Hello Miss Lonesome”, Williams conjures the image (a composite of people he knows, he says) of that guy who has just the stuff to keep the party going ‘til dawn, and who you might catch “sniffin’ around” your “pride and joy.” There’s “Beautiful Dress”, on which Williams seems to channel balladeer Elvis on the verse and the Future Feminist herself, Ahnoni, on a lilting, tremulous hook; in contrast, the brooding “I Didn’t Make A Plan”, casts Williams as the cad. In a deep-voiced delivery akin to Leonard Cohen—unusual for the singer—he callously, matter-of-factly tosses a lover aside, just cuz. It’s brutal, but so, sometimes, is life. And there’s “Nobody Gets What They Want Anymore”, a duet with Harding, recorded after the two broke up, with Williams directing Harding’s recording via a late-night long distance phone call. “It made the most sense to have her singing on it,” he says. “But it wasn’t that easy to make that happen.”

Williams flipped the script recording-wise as well. After three weeks of pre-production five doors from his mother’s house in his native Lyttelton, New Zealand (for several years, Williams has made his home in Melbourne) with regular collaborator Ben Edwards—“really the only person I’d ever worked with before”—Williams and his backing band, The Yarra Benders, then decamped 7000 miles away, to Northern California’s Panoramic Studios, to record with producer Noah Georgeson, who’s helmed baroque pop and alt-folk gems by Joanna Newsom, Adam Green, Little Joy and Devendra Banhart. “I was a really big fan of those Cate Le Bon records he did [Mug Museum, Crab Day],” Williams says. “I was obsessed with those albums.”

If the idea in going so far from home to make the new record was to shake things up and get out of his Kiwi comfort zone, Williams succeeded—to the point where at first he wondered if he’d gone too far. “The first couple of days I nearly had a breakdown,” he recalls. “Just cause I got there and I’m working with Noah on this really personal record having only met twice before over a coffee. I was like, ‘I wish we’d talked about it a little bit more’ and figured out exactly how the dynamic was going to work.” Williams is a worrier. But he needn’t worry. He and Georgeson settled into a zone over twelve days of recording, helped by the bonding experience of what Williams describes as the “greatest prank of all time”, with Georgeson convincing both Williams and multi-instrumentalist Dave Khan that there was a ghost in the studio, using an effect on his keyboard. Georgeson made his mark on the record as well, adding a fresh perspective on songs that had been well developed in pre-production, and alongside the incredible performances by The Yarra Benders, they have, in Make Way For Love, a triumph on their hands.

The record also moves Williams several paces away from “country”—the genre that’s been affixed to him more than any in recent years, but one that’s always been a bit too reductive to be wholly accurate. Going back to his high school years band The Unfaithful Ways and his subsequent Sad But True series of collaborations with fellow New Zealander Delaney Davidson, and on through his first solo LP, Williams has proven himself plenty adept with country sounds, but also bluegrass, folk, blues and even retro pop. “I think I’ve always been sort of mischievously passive when people use that term [“country”] to describe me,” he says. “I like letting labels be and sort of just play that out.” Make Way For Love, with forays into cinematic strings, reverb, rollicking guitar and at least one quiet piano ballad, is more expansive—while still retaining, on “Party Boy” and “I Know A Jeweller”, some cowboy vibes, the record will likely invoke as many Scott Walker and Ennio Morricone mentions as it does country ones. “I think just having the time,” he explains, “and having just finished a cycle of playing these quite heavily country-leaning songs for the last three or four years, and playing them a lot, has definitely pushed me into exploring other things.

As ever, you can expect some memorable videos with the new album. As reluctant as he’s been to put his lyrical heart on his sleeve in the past, Williams has never been shy about visuals and the more performative aspects of his art. Unlike many of his folk and alt-country brethren, Williams embraces the chameleonic possibilities offered by music videos. Since The Unfaithful Ways, he’s appeared in nearly all of his videos, assuming a variety of characters—multiple ones, in the Roshomon-like “Dark Child.” He’s gotten naked and visceral, in “Hello Miss Lonesome” and loose and playful in this past summer’s one-off, “Vampire Again”, which saw Williams as a goofy Nosferatu—his most lighthearted persona to date. “For me, I think that ambiguity is such an important part of my process and my art,” he explains, “that [videos are] just another way to further muddy the waters, you know? And I look for that, I think.” He’ll further muddy the waters with a new video for opening single “Nobody Gets What They Want Anymore”, directed by Ben Kitnick, in which Williams plays an overwhelmed waiter at a restaurant full of demanding hipsters.

On the live front, Williams—who’s been a road dog in recent years, touring with Justin Townes Earle, Band Of Horses, City & Colour and Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam —had a comparatively low-key 2017, though appearances at Newport Folk Festival, Pickathon and Into The Great Wide Open kept him in game shape, not to mention February support dates in New Zealand for none other than Bruce Springsteen. In 2018, Williams will head out on a 50 plus date world tour, taking the music of Make Way For Love far and wide. They’re songs that need to be heard by anyone who’s ever loved, and lost, and loved again.

If “breakup record” is a trope—and certainly it is—then Marlon Williams has done it proud. Like the best of the lot—Beck’s Sea Change, Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, Phosphorescent’s harrowing “Song For Zula” and Joni Mitchell’s masterpiece Blue (written perhaps not coincidentally, following her own breakup with another gifted musician) Make Way For Love doesn’t shy away from heartbreak, but rather stares it in the face, and mines beauty from it. Delicate and bold, tender and searing, it’s a mightily personal new step for the Kiwi, and ultimately, on the record’s final, title track, Williams dusts himself off and is ready to move forward. Set to a doo-wop backdrop and in language he calls “deliberately archaic”, that superb voice sings: “Here is the will/ Here is the way/ The way into love/ Oh, let the wonder of the ages/ Be revealed as love.”


John Norris
October 2017 

“Even my subconscious is self-conscious,” Okay Kaya sings on “Inside Of A Plum”, giving us a sense of the mental state she entered while making SAP, an album she wrote, performed, engineered, and produced alone, sometimes spending weeks at a time without social interaction. This is a concept album about consciousness in which Okay Kaya focuses her trademark combination of abstraction and wit on what happens to her mind unaccompanied, on her tendency to feel less like a human and more like the sticky secretion of a tree. After releasing her Spellemann Award winning album Watch This Liquid Pour Itself in January of 2020, Kaya left her home in New York and moved to Europe to create and show her various interdisciplinary exhibitions. Among others, she made an installation that amplified music made underwater and an interactive sculpture based on Jungian sandplay therapy for children. Between her exhibits, Kaya recorded through lockdowns by herself in the loaned studios of generous friends. SAP first grew from the first single “Spinal Tap” about Kaya wandering in Berlin, tree-touching. “Sap reminds me of the bodily functions I need to remember to do, like sleep. One might say it ‘resinates.’” The album was further inspired by Ketamine Therapy which is discussed in “The Inside Of A Plum.” Kaya explains, “The doctor said this treatment grows literal physical branches in your brain.” As she experimented with ego death, the subject of her song “Jazzercise”, Kaya found herself writing in the voices of fictional characters she’d encountered in other people’s stories. In ‘Jolene From Her Own Perspective,’ she imagines Dolly Parton’s nemesis responding to her song. In ‘Origin Story,’ Kaya writes as a mythical goddess frustrated with her creation myth. In ‘I’ve Spent Forever Planning A Crisis,’ Kaya responds to Cassavetes’ film A Woman Under The Influence writing from the perspective of the story’s children. Okay Kaya’s investigations of mind-body come along with sexy dance beats, unpredictable interlocking synths, delicate soft guitars, and close-to-the-mike R&B whispering. But Kaya likes her falsettos cracking and her soul-inspired hooks careening wildly, a beautiful chaos that somehow fits together. When she returned to New York, Kaya was excited to collaborate again, to get friends to “bless the record.” She invited friends to Gaia Studios in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to sing or play an instrument. Most songs on the album unfold with guest performances from artists as varied as deem spencer, Taja Cheek of L’Rain and Adam Green of The Moldy Peaches. Just as the recording process began with isolation and ended with friends, SAP starts with the internal and leads outside to romance, to lovers who serve as funhouse mirrors, reflecting Kaya back to herself from different angles. In “Pearl Gurl” Kaya harmonizes with her multi-tracked second self and sings her uncertain conclusion: “If love is not the answer, it’s one hell of a question.”

Giving sequence to the smooth noir Guerrinha first discovered in 2018’s "Wagner" LP (self-released), "Cidade Grande" expands the midi jazz quartet to an ensemble. Whereas "Wagner" dealt in firmly sculpted motifs, here we approach fusion territory, improvisational fury, while somehow still treading in a thick, longing, atmosphere. Themes will erase themselves between Joe Zawinul and Koji Kondo while erratic snare rolls à la DeJohnette froth continually. One feels surrounded, at one and the same time, by the vulgar elegance of office buildings and the stillness of one's own childhood bedroom, pitch black except for a portable videogame's screen, way past bedtime. Tracks "José pt. I" and "II", opener and closer of "Cidade Grande", offer glimpses into our opaque protagonist. In stripped-down keys and synth arrangements, windy soliloquies out of Rheji Burrell’s APTs overtake Hejiran landscapes. José is damned to megalomania—just like any other inhabitant of the big city, Guerrinha would add.

オリジナルは4万円もの高値を記録したこともある激レア盤！Astor Piazzollaとの仕事やグラミー賞受賞でも知られるアルゼンチン・ブエノスアイレス出身の作曲家、キーボーディスト、編曲家、指揮者のCarlos Franzettiが1977年に米国の〈Guinness Records〉から発表した作品『Grafitti』が〈Jazz Room Records〉より待望のアナログ再発。ニューヨークのジャズ・シーンでブレイクを果たそうと奮闘していた時期に録音したジャズ風味のラテン・ファンク・ソウル・アルバム。Ray Mantilla（パーカッション）、Victor Venegas（ベース）、Tito Puente OrchestraのDick Meza（フルート、ソプラノ・サックス）といった一流のメンバーと共にカルロスは全てのキーボードを演奏し、ナンバーを書き下ろし、全てのアレンジメントを担当しています。アメリカではすぐに忘れ去られてしまった作品ながら、ロンドンの初期のジャズ・ダンス・シーンのDJたちに取り上げられ、必携のカットとなった"Cocoa Funk"は〈Soul Jazz Records〉の代表的な再発シリーズ〈London Jazz Classics〉でもピックされています。

It’s always summer somewhere, but especially so wherever Cheryl Glasgow’s carefree clubber “Glued To The Spot” plays. An absolute ear-worm from its first nylon strums, Glasgow’s Sade-adjacent, jazz vocalese sweeps into a warm-up tempo groove and never quite breaks a sweat. Issued on Ross Anderson’s short-lived, London-based Live label, “Glued To The Spot” swept through the club scene briefly in 1987, disembarking for warmer shores when the season changed.