MUSIC
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"The classical musicians have a foot in improv; the jazz players get Indian music."
The Guardian, contemporary album of the month
"A record that transcends generic assumptions of the lazily termed “Eastern style”..."
The Vinyl Factory
"A truly enriching listen."
Songlines, ★★★★★
Off the back of Sarathy Korwar's much lauded Day To Day album comes the live album My East Is Your West - a performance that takes the fusion of Indian classical music with the jazz tradition further than its ever been before. Recorded live at London's Church Of Sound, the album is a homage to the great musicians of the 60s and 70s spiritual jazz movement, covering the likes of Alice Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, and Joe Henderson. Korwar plays alongside the UPAJ Collective, a group of highly-versatile musicians who share Sarathy's passion for jazz and Indian music and who have together managed to rebalance the cross-cultural relationship between 'Western' and 'Eastern' music.
With every record Sarathy releases his music becomes more exploratory and insightful, delving into his personal influences, which also inspire much of the music in the jazz scene that surrounds him. At a time where UK jazz is being heralded for its progression, innovation and far-reaching appeal to people from varying backgrounds, ‘My East Is Your West’ is an essential record that explores cultural and musical diversity in way that will continue to be relevant for years to come.
Maestro melodist Christophe Petchanatz (aka Klimperei) and all around music fanatic David Fenech engage remotely in a repetitive exchange of recordings and overdubs on their debut album titled ‘Rainbow de Nuit’, sporadically spanning over the last decade. Evocations of experimental and improvised jazz, chansonesque songs, bluesy folk, and outsider music undulate harmoniously across the record. From music boxes and walkie-talkies down to plastic straws, plucking various stringed instruments such as the charrango and banjo, kazoos and snake-charmer ocarina and flutes, all the way through the sweet accordion and melodica, found and traditional tuned percussion - there is far from a shortage of sound sources on this freakishly inviting record. What germinates as an imaginative and emotional chord progression played by Klimperei, evolves with Fenech layering additional recordings, which would then find their way back home to Klimperei yet again, and so on, and so forth. This recursive compositional and improvisational loop, combined with Fenech’s musique-concrete-like mixing and editing techniques, transforms the acoustic recordings by way of compression, saturation, and reverberation or simple pitch changes - resulting in the duo’s recordings seemingly sound like they may very well be an octet in real time. While the majority of the recordings have been ping-ponged remotely, David and Christophe unite under one roof to record the closing track of the album.
The pieces presented on ‘Rainbow de Nuit’ treat the ears to a carousel ride waltzing through a multiverse made up of surrealist puppet theaters, dramatic film noir act changes, and a mosaic of polyphonic instruments and toys alike. In other words, a score to a fable brought to life with haunting yet charming melodies and occasional hallucinatory voices reminiscent of laughter and infantile epiphanies which we hear on Tarzan en Tasmanie and Madrigal for Lola. This is taken a step further by Fenech, to a brief libretto of incomprehensible tongues on Pocarina. Amid the mysterious and dark (Septième Ciel and Rugit Le Coeur) also lies tender and simple compositions (Rainbow de Nuit and Chevalier Gambette), murky suspenseful melancholy (Levy Attend and Eno Ennio), and casually slipping into pensive psychedelic backdrops (Un Cercueil à Deux Places) - forming a colorful blend of sounds. A world of echoes. A tale of tales. One persistent earworm that you’ll likely be whistling and humming along to on a first listen.
picnic follow up their self-titled debut album with ‘creaky little branch’.
A love for early 00's electronica guides the listener as it sits somewhere between familiarity and the unknown. However, this isn’t an exercise in nostalgia, instead foreground for the here and now.
With contributions from Alejandra & Aeron, el2, Kindtree, Nico Callaghan, samb_rules, Craig Tattersall (The Humble Bee, Hood, The Boats, etc.), Theodore Cale Schafer and Ultrafog.
Kitchen sink Scuzz n’ Bass from 1998 Tokyo. Existing somewhere between Drum n Bass, Musique Concrète, Free Jazz and Noise,
Jigen (aka Taro Nijikama) ran the cult Shi-Ra-Nui imprint and was a lynchpin of Tokyo's underground music scene, working as much behind the scenes as in front of them.
There is an inherent grit to the work on display here. Jazz-inflected
drums, echoing bells, dissonant flutes, and haunting piano work coarsely interact with skipping breaks and industrial atmospherics, punctuated by tense gasps of silence. Samples disintegrate and reappear, creating a kind of elliptical narrative, and the 9 tracks here perhaps trigger a disorienting sense of dèjá vu.
Originally released on CD by Shi-Ra-Nui in 1998, Double Circumflex is
proud to present the first officially licensed reissue of Stone Drum Avantgardism by Jigen and introduces the prescient sound of Shi-Ra-Nui for deeper excavation into its shadowy fissures. Remastered and cut with maximum precision by Beau Thomas at Teneightseven.