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After being blown away by a few tunes – probably just as you will be after listening to this - Samy Ben Redjeb traveled to the infamous capital city of Somalia in November of 2016, making Analog Africa the first music label to set foot in Mogadishu.
On his arrival in Somalia, Samy began rifling through piles of cassettes and listening to reel-to-reel tapes in the dusty archives of Radio Mogadishu, looking for music that "swam against the current."
The stars were aligned: an uncovered and unmarked pile of discarded recordings was discovered in a cluttered corner of the building. Colonel Abshir - the senior employee and protector of Radio Mogadishu's archives - clarified that the pile consisted mostly of music nobody had manage to identify, or music he described as being "mainly instrumental and strange music." At the words "strange music," Samy was hooked, the return flight to Tunisia was cancelled.
The pile turned out to be a cornucopia of different sounds: radio jingles, background music, interludes for radio programs, television shows and theater plays. There were also a good number of disco tunes, some had been stripped of their lyrics, the interesting parts had been recorded multiple times then cut, taped together and spliced into a long groovy instrumental loop. Over the next three weeks, often in watermelon, grapefruit juice and shisha-fuelled night-time sessions behind the fortified walls of Radio Mogadishu, Samy and the archive staff put together Mogadisco: Dancing Mogadishu, 1974–1991.
Like everywhere in Africa during the 1970s, both men and women sported huge afros, bell-bottom trousers and platform shoes. James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and The Temptations' funk were the talk of the town.
In 1977, Iftin Band were invited to perform at the Festac festival in Lagos where they represented Somalia at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. Not only did they come back with an award but they also returned with Afrobeat. While Fela Kuti's "Shakara" had taken over the continent and was spreading like wildfire throughout Latin America, it was the track "Lady" that would become the hit in Mogadishu.
At the same time, Bob Marley was busy kick-starting reggae-mania in Somalia, which became such a phenomenon that even the police and military bands began playing it. Some say that it was adopted so quickly because of the strong similarities with the traditional beat from the western region of Somalia, called Dhaanto.
But then suddenly the trousers got tighter as the disco tsunami hit the country. Michael Jackson appeared with a new sound that would revolutionize Somalia's live music scene. You couldn't walk the streets of Mogadishu without seeing kids trying to moonwalk.
"Somalia had several nightclubs and although most use DJs to play records, some hotels like Jubba, Al-Uruba and Al Jazeera showcased live bands such as Iftin and Shareero" - so ran a quote from a 1981 article about the explosion of Mogadishu's live music scene. The venues mentioned in that article were the luxury hotels that had been built to cover the growing demands of the tourist industry. The state-of-the-art hotel Al-Uruba, with its oriental ornaments and white plastered walls, was a wonder of modern architecture. All of Mogadishu's top bands performed there at some point or another, and many of the songs presented in this compilation were created in such venues.
Mogadisco was not Analog Africa's easiest project. Tracking down the musicians - often in exile in the diaspora - to interview them and gather anecdotes of golden-era Mogadishu has been an undertaking that took three years. Tales of Dur-Dur Band's kidnapping, movie soundtracks recorded in the basements of hotels, musicians getting electrocuted on stage, others jumping from one band to another under dramatic circumstances, and soul singers competing against each other, are all stories included in the massive booklet that accompanies the compilation - adorned with no less then 18 pictures from the '70s and '80s.
As Colonel Abshir Hashi Ali, chief don at the Radio Mogadishu archive - someone who once wrestled a bomber wielding an unpinned hand-grenade to the floor - put it: "I have dedicated my life to this place. I'm doing this so it can get to the next generation; so that the culture, the heritage and the songs of Somalia don't disappear."
More information can be found here.
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For Patrick Flegel, Cindy Lee is more than just a recording music project. It is the culmination of a lifelong exploration of art, the electric guitar, queer identity and gender expression. "Singers like Patsy Cline and The Supremes carried me through the hardest times of my life," explains Flegel, "and also provided the soundtrack to the best times."
Following the dissolution of Canadian experimental indie band Women, Flegel would delve deeper into songwriting that bends further toward high atmospherics and bracing melodies – a unique space where splendor naturally collides with experimentation. Delivering moments of sheer beauty through somber reflections on longing and loneliness, Cindy Lee is something to hold onto in a world of disorder.
What's Tonight To Eternity, Cindy Lee's fifth long-form offering, showcases the project's most entrancing strengths: ethereal snowdrift pop and sly nods toward classic girl-group motifs. Recorded at Flegel's Realistik Studios in Toronto and featuring younger brother Andrew Flegel on drums, the album travels hand in hand with a spectral guide.
Flegel found inspiration for Cindy Lee in the form of Karen Carpenter, drawing on the singer / drummer's early recordings as well as her look and style. "I found a deep interest and comfort in Karen's story, which is a cautionary tale about the monstrosity of show business, stardom at a young age and being a misfit looking for connection. The darkness and victimizing tabloid sensationalism she suffered is easily tempered and overwhelmed by her earnest output, her artistry, her tireless work ethic. Something utterly unique and magical takes shape in the negative space, out of exclusion. What I relate to in her has to do with what is hidden, what is unknown."
What's Tonight To Eternity remains a mix of pop culture indoctrination, pain and suffering, hopes and dreams, fierce confrontations and wide-open confessional blurs. Closing with the song "Heavy Metal" (dedicated to the memory of former Women bandmate Chris Reimer) and adorned by Andrea Lukic's Journal of Smack artwork, the album continues the bold and rewarding path on which Cindy Lee has embarked.
More information can be found here.
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The aural illustration of a year of bliss, sorrow, and stasis, NYC bedroom-ambient wanderer Viul follows last spring's Bright Decline (Disques d'Honoré, 2019) with thirteen new pieces weaving delicate hints of vocals, synthesizer, tape texture and field recording into his foundational guitar loops. On Outside the Dream World, his debut full-length for emerging ambient curator Past Inside the Present, Viul quickly coaxes unlikely melodies to the fore: "Sur Canadian TV" builds ominously from the residue of orchestral tune-up collage "Spring Mash," while the gauze of the title track momentarily disguises a sinewy pop arrangement before ceding to the frigid, expansive "Sewn." The record's second side hosts a study in contrasts embodied by the dense swirl of "Spacefuck Symmetry Endpoint" against the near-motionless finale "Shroud." Mastered at Black Knoll Studio by Rafael Anton Irisarri and featuring cover photography by Benoît Pioulard, Outside the Dream World is a vivid addition to PITP's growing catalogue of ambient serenity.
More information can be found here.
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The prolific Kink Gong (aka Laurent Jeanneau) returns in a unique duet with one of the most prominent artists of the Chinese avantgardist scene Li Daiguo. Kink Gong and Li Daiguo first met in Chengdu (capital of Sichuan Province, China) while playing the same night at the Jahbar music venue.
A few months later, as they become neighbors in Cai Cun, a village near the old town of Dali (Yunnan), Kink Gong begins recording Daiguo playing Pipa, Cello and Zheng. He then proceeded to deconstruct these recordings while adding voices that he mainly recorded in Yunnan Province. This fantastic combination of field recordings, experimental folk melodies and electronic treatment leads us to a fourth underground universe reminiscent of Jon Hassell's finest hours.
More information can be found here.
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Future Predictions is a set of ensemble pieces made with tape loops, from digital and acoustic instruments, field recordings and foley sounds. With a focus on introspection and imagination, each piece begins with all layers playing, with minimal additional long-term structural development in order to maintain a state. Each piece of music is accompanied by photos, and text written with a shifting tense.
As a follow-up to 2018's Memory Repetitions which was based on memory and the interpretation of it over time, Future Predictions is instead based on the idea of future situations, and should be seen as a meditation on future events.
All music was recorded with high-quality recycled reel-to-reel tape. It has been mastered by Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung, and designed by Rutger Zuydervelt.
Limited edition, custom-made clamshell box, 4xCDs in pocket sleeves, and 16-page booklet. Digital version includes PDF booklet.
More information can be found here.
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The first LP from Scorn since 2010's Refuse; Start Fires, Cafe Mor is Mick Harris in his happy place. Which just happens to be in studio, demolishing all standards and rules for electronic bass music, and embodying the darkest, deepest sound in dub. Cafe Mor takes risks outside of the conventional Scorn apparatus and with these risks come substantial rewards.
The album is comprised of powerful dub excursions, from the deep dark dank of the front two tracks "Elephant" and "The Lower The Middle Our Bit," and gaining steam towards the ultraviolence of "Mugwump Tea Room" to "Never Let It Be Said" to the CRUSHING DEATH KICK of "Who Are They Which One." A quick drive under the lights with a lasered out snare on "Dulse," then we come across the appearance from Sleaford Mods frontman, Jason Williamson, on the standout track on the LP, "Talk Whiff."
Cafe Mor culminates in the all-in-one dub affair "SA70," letting rip all the new mixer and FX techniques of Harris' most recent incarnation of Scorn. The album is the official soundtrack for all smoked-out backroom deals, situations and arrangements, cancelling all small tours, and mongoose rhinocharging the bass to level 24.
More information can be found here.
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"Raime strain at the harness in four cuttingly sharp mutations of Afrobeats, Footwork, and Jungle with scintillating results on the 2nd release on their RR imprint.
Where the London duo’s 2018 EP and RR debut We Can't Be That Far From The Beginning evoked a meditative mood from the info overload of their home city that left acres of space to the imagination, the Planted EP rejoins the dance with four tracks that icily acknowledge strong influence from Latin American and Chicago footwork styles in a classically skooled mutation of hardcore British dance music.
In four fleetingly ambiguous dancefloor workouts they carry on a conceptual theme exploring the digital subconscious with persistently invasive, alien ambient shrapnel - half-heard voices, aleatoric prangs, and tag-covered signposts - woven into and thru their tightly coiled and reflexive drum programming.
Uptown, "Num" flexes tendons and hips like a Leonce riddim that danced all the way from NOLA and ATL to the wintery dawn of a LDN warehouse, while the lip-biting tension of minimalist 160bpm jungle/footwork patterns and jibber-jawed vocals in "Ripli" suggests the Alien film's protagonist lost in a mazy rave space, chased by H.R. Giger-designed face huggers (or gurning energy vampires). Downtown "Kella" then catches them on a grimy dubtech bounce, cocked back and straining at the harness, before "Belly" shuts down the dance with invasive, demonic motifs exploding over dark blue chords and palpitating jungle subs with impeccable darkside style."
-via Boomkat
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On September 12, 2018 Sonic Youth co-founder Lee Ranaldo and guitarist extraordinaire Jean-Marc Montera joined Maurizio and Roberto Opalio in their hometown Torino, Italy, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the brothers' visionary project My Cat Is An Alien. That evening the stage of Alfa Teatro—a liberty-style, historical theater built in 1928—hosted the live world premiere of this quartet, whose members already collaborated live and on records with each other during the years, yet never all the four together. The quartet live performance followed MCIAA's radical aesthetic of "instantaneous composition," where nothing is defined nor drafted prior to the act of music creation, and every sound and action is shaped around a higher-order scheme dictated by the empathy and synergy of the actual moment of enlightenment. The show was also accompanied by the projection of a brand new cinematic poetry dual film created by Roberto Opalio and previewed on the occasion, whose Super-8 film's relentless flickering and ascending motion worked "ad hoc" to match the music and body gestures of the performance, thus enhancing its transcendental power.
That night Maurizio Opalio (self-made double-bodied wooden string instrument, pedal effects, bell), Roberto Opalio (wordless vocalizations, bodhran, Alientronics, electric guitar, space toys), Jean-Marc Montera (table top guitar, pedals, little gong), and Lee Ranaldo (vocals, electric guitar, bells) moved through still unexplored and unheard music territories.
This music is a pure ecstatic revelation, a unique, powerful and spiritual experience all of its own. Listening to this album we are offered a true epiphany just as uniquely gifted genius improvisers/composers of the past would grace our ears and souls.
More information can be found here.
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Faitiche is delighted to present a new album by Andrew Pekler. Sounds From Phantom Islands brings together ten tracks created over the last three years for the interactive website Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas. With his 2016 album Tristes Tropiques, Pekler created a highly unique cosmos of ethnographic sound speculations. Sounds From Phantom Islands continues and simultaneously expands this concept: finely elaborated chordal motifs float like fog over fictional maritime landscapes. A masterpiece of contemporary Exotica.
Phantom islands are islands that appeared on historical maps but never actually existed. The status of these artefacts of European colonial expansion from the 15th to the 19th century oscillates between cartographic fact and maritime fiction. Sounds From Phantom Islands interprets and presents these imaginations as a quasi-ethnographic catalog of music and synthetic field recordings. The pieces on this album are based on recordings made for Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas, an online interactive map developed with cultural anthropologist Stefanie Kiwi Menrath.
More information can be found here.
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January 24, 2020, Unseen Worlds will release Robert Haigh’s new album Black Sarabande on LP/CD/Digital worldwide via Secretly Distribution. The first single “Ghosts of Blacker Dyke” will be released 12.06.2019 alongside the album announcement.
Black Sarabande expands upon pianist-composer Robert Haigh’s beguiling debut for Unseen Worlds with a collection of intimate and evocative piano-led compositions. Black Sarabande expands upon pianist-composer Robert Haigh’s beguiling debut for Unseen Worlds with a collection of intimate and evocative piano-led compositions. Haigh was born and raised in the ‘pit village’ of Worsbrough in South Yorkshire, England. His father, as most of his friends’ fathers, was a miner, who worked at the local colliery. Etched into Haigh’s work are formative memories of the early morning sounds of coal wagons being shunted on the tracks, distant trains passing, and walking rural paths skirting the barren industrial landscape.
The album opens with the title track — a spacious, plaintive piano motif develops through a series of discordant variations before resolving. On ‘Stranger On The Lake,’ sweeping textures and found sounds lay the foundation for a two chord piano phrase evoking a sense of elegy. ‘Wire Horses’ is an atmospheric audio painting of open spaces and distant lights. ’Air Madeleine’ uses variations in tempo and dynamics to craft the most seductively melodic track on the album. ‘Arc Of Crows’ improvises on a single major seventh chord, splintering droplets of notes as ghostly wisps of melodic sound slowly glide into view. ‘Ghosts Of Blacker Dyke’ is a melancholic evocation of Haigh’s roots in England’s industrial north — intermingling dissonant sounds of industry within a set of languid piano variations. ‘Progressive Music’ is constructed around a series of lightly dissonant arpeggiated piano chords which modulate through major and minor key changes before resolving at a wistful and enigmatic refrain. In ‘The Secret Life of Air’, a nocturnal, low piano line slowly weaves its way through the close-miked ambience of the room, nearly halting as each note is allowed to form and reverberate into a blur with the next. The ambitious ‘Painted Serpent’ calmly begins with drone-like pads and builds with the introduction of counterpoint piano lines and an orchestral collage of sound underpinned by a deliberate bass motif. ’Broken Symmetry’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ highlight Haigh’s gift for blurring the line between dissonance and harmony - opaque piano portraits of moonlight and shadows glancingly evoke the impressionistic palettes of Harold Budd, Debussy and Satie.
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I have always found Portland’s Ilyas Ahmed to be an elusive and enigmatically unusual artist, though I have recently realized that I am basing much of that opinion on his 2005 debut (Between Two Skies). That album remains a cult favorite in some circles, as it exists in murkily melancholy and ghostly shadow realm between free folk and drone. The varied work that Ahmed has released in between that minor classic and this latest cassette has only made it more difficult to pin down his strange and shifting aesthetic, but it also feels as if no time has passed at all: Behold Killers returns once more to the blurry, diffuse gray area where structure, improvisation, drone, and experimentalism precariously coexist and bleed together. However, while the fluid approach to structure on this release is not a far cry from Ahmed's early days, the execution has improved considerably, as Behold Killers explore far warmer and more nuanced emotional territory than much of his previous work. I still find some elements of the album perplexing, of course, but it is anchored by a couple of excellent longform pieces.
The first side of Behold Killers is devoted entirely to one of its strongest pieces, "Pass No Jazz."It also kind of an archetypal Ahmed composition in its unusual trajectory, as it opens as kind of a straightforwardly melodic classical guitar piece, yet gradually erases all traces of that original theme as it slowly blossoms into something quite different.Moreover, the path from the initial motif to the final destination in far from a linear one, as "Pass No Jazz" takes a series of detours that follow a kind of dream logic.Some of those detours are quite beautiful, such as the quavering, shimmering, and throbbing synth reverie that follows the disappearance of the acoustic guitar.After that fades, however, the piece becomes a sleepily tender vocal piece that unfolds over a simmering bed of guitar noise and synth drones.Gradually, however, sharper-edged swells emerge from the fog and cohere into swaying and swooning dance of sustained feedback-like tones.Then that dissolves to make way for a gently rippling final coda of wobbly, chorus-heavy arpeggios embellished with percussion that sounds borrowed from either a Tibetan Buddhist ritual or an ancient Japanese court.Throughout it all, I have no idea what is coming next and no ideas ever seem to overlap or repeat, which is a very strange and abstract compositional technique.On one level, it kind of sounds like five brief, unrelated pieces that have been loosely stitched together, yet they amount to a weirdly satisfying arc nonetheless.Still, I cannot shake the sense that at least two of those pieces could have been even better if they had been expanded and allowed to stand on their own.
To some degree, that approach pervades the entire album, though the number of discrete movements within each piece varies a bit.For example, the following "Metal Freedom" opens with an evocative and textured field recording of birds that swells into a very cool organ drone interlude, but the bottom then drops out completely and the piece re-emerges as a disorienting mélange of synth-based ambient, wordless vocals, and gnarled fragments of buzzing, distorted guitar.It feels a lot like some kind of sublime religious ritual being antagonized by large, extra-dimensional bees, which I suppose is a neat achievement.The following "Mad Love" is a comparative (and brief) aberration though, as Ahmed uncharacteristically sticks to just a single theme (woozy arpeggios mingled with hazy drones) for its three minutes, but it is mostly just a palette cleanser for the excellent closer ("Wild Violet").Happily, "Wild Violet" also holds onto a single theme for its entire duration, as it unfolds as a warm reverie of languorously tumbling and intertwining arpeggios over a lazily shifting and smoldering synth drone.As it progresses, however, more structured melodies start to take shape and moaning, buzzing swells billow up from the underlying drones.It is an absolutely gorgeous and perfectly focused piece that displays incredible patience, nuance, and lightness of touch.I could have happily listened to an infinite loop in this vein, but Ahmed instead abruptly and unceremoniously just cuts the piece off at the 8:56 mark.That was a very curious decision indeed.
Given that jarring conclusion to the album's most perfect piece, I definitely feel like I am no closer to understanding how Ahmed's mind works, yet Behold Killers has at least brought me much closer to understanding the appeal of what that mind can produce.If I did understand where Ahmed was coming from, I would hypothesize that pieces like "Pass No Jazz" are simply collages of unrelated improvisations and unfinished ideas or that he has some perverse urge to aggressively deconstruct and subvert all of his best motifs in service of a fragmented, non-linear flow.The focused and lovely "Wild Violet," however, seems to indicate that Ahmed is perfectly happy to linger on a single theme sometimes (until he runs out of tape, anyway).Given that, there is definitely an element of exasperation to this album, but I can only be exasperated if I actually like something in the first place and I do like this album: Ahmed does an excellent job combining biting, ravaged textures with passages of tender, fragile beauty.The catch is just that those delightful sounds and lovely interludes never quite stick around long enough to amount to a complete, fully formed piece.I have no idea if that is a mere stylistic idiosyncrasy or a sign that Ahmed's compositional talents are not yet on the same level as his ideas and I think I will just have to resign myself to that nagging ambiguity (if I haven't figured him out after 15 years, odds are strong that I never will).In any case, I enjoyed this tape–Behold Killers is a puzzling and flawed experience at times, but it is a frequently compelling one as well.
Samples can be found here.
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