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GB 157CD
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$15.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 6/7/2024
Folk music emerging from Dublin seems to be everywhere at the moment -- demonstrated most clearly by Lankum gaining a host of "Album of the Year" nods at the end of 2023 -- but it would be a mistake to call this a movement, much less any kind of revival. While Lankum, John Francis Flynn, Ye Vagabonds, Lisa O'Neill et al might be new to a lot of audiences, these artists have been exploring and expanding what folk music can be for years, decades even. And this is just as true of Landless, the quartet who've been singing together since 2013, finding each other through the traditional singing scene in the city and, crucially, the Sacred Harp singing community. Working once again with John "Spud" Murphy (the Lankum producer and ØXN member), Lúireach sees the quartet adding sparingly-used instrumentation -- Ruth's aching pump organ on "Death & The Lady," Méabh's shruti box on "Ej Husari," Lankum's Cormac MacDiarmada on fiddle, viola and banjo throughout, even some mournful trombone from Alex Borwick on "The Newry Highwayman." The songs for the album were gathered over a number of years, Ruth explains, and while the melody and lyrics are paramount, there is a common theme for many of the inclusions. Lúireach is an album of quiet power, soaked in tradition but finding new and exciting ways to present these remarkable songs, songs that are full of melancholy, love, death and mystery. Lúireach rewards your close attention.
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LP
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GB 157LP
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$28.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 6/7/2024
LP version. Folk music emerging from Dublin seems to be everywhere at the moment -- demonstrated most clearly by Lankum gaining a host of "Album of the Year" nods at the end of 2023 -- but it would be a mistake to call this a movement, much less any kind of revival. While Lankum, John Francis Flynn, Ye Vagabonds, Lisa O'Neill et al might be new to a lot of audiences, these artists have been exploring and expanding what folk music can be for years, decades even. And this is just as true of Landless, the quartet who've been singing together since 2013, finding each other through the traditional singing scene in the city and, crucially, the Sacred Harp singing community. Working once again with John "Spud" Murphy (the Lankum producer and ØXN member), Lúireach sees the quartet adding sparingly-used instrumentation -- Ruth's aching pump organ on "Death & The Lady," Méabh's shruti box on "Ej Husari," Lankum's Cormac MacDiarmada on fiddle, viola and banjo throughout, even some mournful trombone from Alex Borwick on "The Newry Highwayman." The songs for the album were gathered over a number of years, Ruth explains, and while the melody and lyrics are paramount, there is a common theme for many of the inclusions. Lúireach is an album of quiet power, soaked in tradition but finding new and exciting ways to present these remarkable songs, songs that are full of melancholy, love, death and mystery. Lúireach rewards your close attention.
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LP
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GB 155LP
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$28.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 5/10/2024
LP version. This self-titled second album from Gordan, the acclaimed transnational (Serbia/Germany/Austria) experimental trio, fuses traditional Balkan vocalizations with feedback, electronic sound generators, pulsing bass and hypnotic drumming. Gordan mirrors the mysticism of legends and stories from the Balkan region, creating a music that stretches between expressiveness and abstraction; tradition and the avant-garde. The visceral vocals of Svetlana Spajic (Marina Abramovic, Lenhart Tapes, Antony and the Johnsons) are both rooted and deeply interpretive. In turn, drummer Andi Stecher (STECHER, Billy Bultheel, Orchestre Les Mangelepa), and Guido Möbius on bass and electronics, employ sonic strategies that steer the songs in inspired and unpredictable directions. Gordan makes music that lies between expressiveness and abstraction. Their pieces are not limited by rigid formal structures. Instead, they are open processes that create a loss of sense of time. Reduced arrangements and expressive vocals combine to form a powerful musical whole. This band creates something new from minimalism, intensity and the rich singing tradition of the Balkans. When Down in the Meadow, the first album by Gordan was released by Morphine Records in October 2021, it was celebrated by critics and audiences alike. Now the trio presents its second, even more radical record. Drummer Andi Stecher forgoes any ornamentation and at the same time plays varied and concentrated. Confident and with outstanding technique, he is the engine of the band's sound. His stylistic flexibility demonstrates a profound knowledge of global music history. Guido Möbius plays bass guitar and various electronic sound generators. He also provokes feedback using a guitar amplifier, microphone and effects. These sometimes spherical, sometimes very concrete sounds interact with Svetlana Spajic's voice. Vocals and feedback circle each other in fleeting, ever-changing harmony.
"Gripping, like something ancient being born" --The Wire
"The connection between folk and improvised music, between traditional song and electric noise has been tried in recent years, but rarely as intensively and interestingly." --Rolling Stone (DE)
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CD
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GB 155CD
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$15.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 5/10/2024
This self-titled second album from Gordan, the acclaimed transnational (Serbia/Germany/Austria) experimental trio, fuses traditional Balkan vocalizations with feedback, electronic sound generators, pulsing bass and hypnotic drumming. Gordan mirrors the mysticism of legends and stories from the Balkan region, creating a music that stretches between expressiveness and abstraction; tradition and the avant-garde. The visceral vocals of Svetlana Spajic (Marina Abramovic, Lenhart Tapes, Antony and the Johnsons) are both rooted and deeply interpretive. In turn, drummer Andi Stecher (STECHER, Billy Bultheel, Orchestre Les Mangelepa), and Guido Möbius on bass and electronics, employ sonic strategies that steer the songs in inspired and unpredictable directions. Gordan makes music that lies between expressiveness and abstraction. Their pieces are not limited by rigid formal structures. Instead, they are open processes that create a loss of sense of time. Reduced arrangements and expressive vocals combine to form a powerful musical whole. This band creates something new from minimalism, intensity and the rich singing tradition of the Balkans. When Down in the Meadow, the first album by Gordan was released by Morphine Records in October 2021, it was celebrated by critics and audiences alike. Now the trio presents its second, even more radical record. Drummer Andi Stecher forgoes any ornamentation and at the same time plays varied and concentrated. Confident and with outstanding technique, he is the engine of the band's sound. His stylistic flexibility demonstrates a profound knowledge of global music history. Guido Möbius plays bass guitar and various electronic sound generators. He also provokes feedback using a guitar amplifier, microphone and effects. These sometimes spherical, sometimes very concrete sounds interact with Svetlana Spajic's voice. Vocals and feedback circle each other in fleeting, ever-changing harmony.
"Gripping, like something ancient being born" --The Wire
"The connection between folk and improvised music, between traditional song and electric noise has been tried in recent years, but rarely as intensively and interestingly." --Rolling Stone (DE)
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GB 154CD
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According to Avalanche Kaito drummer Benjamin Chaval, their music comes from "a sound, a sample, a desire, a feeling, or simply a lack of something." And their second album, Talitakum, is the result of a process, where "the whole" is, indeed, "expressed in every part," whatever the provenance. To begin with, the band gigged as much as they could in 2021, the guitarist Nicco Gitto having replaced bassist Arnaud Paquotte, their fiery, mercurial shows becoming "a laboratory" in their own right. 2023 brought two creative residencies; where eight new pieces were sketched out. In July of that year the "aural puzzle" was recorded by Vincent Poujol at the Gam studio in the Belgian Ardennes. In contrast to what went before, there were no plans to rely on live recording, and overdubs were used extensively. Even so, the tracks were still very fresh, sometimes even non-existent: the track "Tanvusse" began in the studio as a sample first heard in Niger. Other tracks like "Lago" were brought to rehearsal as thoughtforms in the singer Kaito Winse's head. Later, Benjamin Chaval assembled, arranged and further produced a body of work "that had to be tamed and reinvented" in concert. First impressions are driven by the different fusions thrown up between polyrhythms and polyphony: a notion of the constant reassembling of various musical building blocks. The opener "Borgo" has a dissonant tone to it. Two minutes in and it's by no means certain who will win out in this musical tug of war between voice, beat and instruments. All elements seem to burn themselves out eventually, living off the warmth of the energy created by their fight in a long meditative tail out. The tracks on the album are informed by Kaito Winse's voice and his use of a traditional flute and mouth bow. All three elements work, sometimes in tandem, as wider ciphers for communication, or "emotive" forms of mystification that inspire and unsettle. Throughout, Winse demonstrates what untapped powers listeners command, bodily; if only they knew how to use them. Alongside Winse, Nico Gitto (guitar) and Benjamin Chaval (drums, synths and electronics) work like mechanics, adding and updating elements to suit.
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LP
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GB 156LP
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LP version. Glitterbeat Presents Ana Lua Caiano's Vou Ficar Neste Quadrado. Ana Lua Caiano's debut album melds rural Portuguese music traditions with layered vocals, synthesizers, insistent beats and field recordings. Her music is visceral and tightly focused pulling from a rich mosaic of influences that includes traditional group singing, musique concrete, songwriters from Portugal's '70s revolutionary period and electronic icons like Bjork and Laurie Anderson. Hailing from Lisbon's fertile musical underground, Caiano's music -- and its international reception -- are moving forward quickly. Her lauded recent performances at Eurosonic and Transmusicales certainly attest to that, as do the laser sharp emotions and highly individual sonics of her much anticipated first album: Vou Ficar Neste Quadrado ("I Shall Stay in This Square"). It's electronic music. Utterly contemporary. Pulsing, glitchy, atmospheric and beat driven but with roots deep in the traditional Portuguese music her parents listened to when she was a child. "They had a lot of cassettes that they'd play," she recalls. "I loved to mimic and I'd imitate the singers. I took it in by osmosis, I suppose, and the elements are still there in what I do." Since she began her sonic experiments during lockdown, Caiano has been relentlessly pushing the borders of her music. It is of course a process that already began when she first imitated traditional singers or took her first piano lesson. It is a process that's led her to the road she's on now, one where tradition and electronics walk side by side. "I think it's quite experimental," she says, affirming that her music emphasizes the restless and evolutionary. "I believe traditional music evolves with the world -- nowadays you can make traditional music with a computer or talk about themes that weren't relevant or didn't exist in the past. Traditional music is always evolving." Travelling forward fast and sure, Ana Lua Caiano is definitely not stuck in a square. Featuring Essence Voices.
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CD
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GB 156CD
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Glitterbeat Presents Ana Lua Caiano's Vou Ficar Neste Quadrado. Ana Lua Caiano's debut album melds rural Portuguese music traditions with layered vocals, synthesizers, insistent beats and field recordings. Her music is visceral and tightly focused pulling from a rich mosaic of influences that includes traditional group singing, musique concrete, songwriters from Portugal's '70s revolutionary period and electronic icons like Bjork and Laurie Anderson. Hailing from Lisbon's fertile musical underground, Caiano's music -- and its international reception -- are moving forward quickly. Her lauded recent performances at Eurosonic and Transmusicales certainly attest to that, as do the laser sharp emotions and highly individual sonics of her much anticipated first album: Vou Ficar Neste Quadrado ("I Shall Stay in This Square"). It's electronic music. Utterly contemporary. Pulsing, glitchy, atmospheric and beat driven but with roots deep in the traditional Portuguese music her parents listened to when she was a child. "They had a lot of cassettes that they'd play," she recalls. "I loved to mimic and I'd imitate the singers. I took it in by osmosis, I suppose, and the elements are still there in what I do." Since she began her sonic experiments during lockdown, Caiano has been relentlessly pushing the borders of her music. It is of course a process that already began when she first imitated traditional singers or took her first piano lesson. It is a process that's led her to the road she's on now, one where tradition and electronics walk side by side. "I think it's quite experimental," she says, affirming that her music emphasizes the restless and evolutionary. "I believe traditional music evolves with the world -- nowadays you can make traditional music with a computer or talk about themes that weren't relevant or didn't exist in the past. Traditional music is always evolving." Travelling forward fast and sure, Ana Lua Caiano is definitely not stuck in a square. Featuring Essence Voices.
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LP
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GB 150LP
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LP version. Sahrawi singer-songwriter activist Aziza Brahim's fifth album Mawja ("wave" in Hassaniya Arabic) is fashioned from a simple but powerful foundational palette: Saharan and Iberian percussion entwining with stately guitars and warm, enveloping bass. Co-produced by Brahim with long-time collaborator Guillem Aguilar, the record from her oeuvre that Mawja most sonically resembles is her revered and graceful debut Soutak (GB 009LP, 2014). That noted, there is a confident eclecticism found here, an expansive take on her vision that even includes a drum pattern inspired by the Clash. Brahim's voice, as always, is a wellspring of deep and resonant emotions. The yearning for homeland. The struggle for freedom. The love for one's elders. The unfurling of time. Waves of history, waves of sound. Mawja.
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LP
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GB 154LP
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LP version. According to Avalanche Kaito drummer Benjamin Chaval, their music comes from "a sound, a sample, a desire, a feeling, or simply a lack of something." And their second album, Talitakum, is the result of a process, where "the whole" is, indeed, "expressed in every part," whatever the provenance. To begin with, the band gigged as much as they could in 2021, the guitarist Nicco Gitto having replaced bassist Arnaud Paquotte, their fiery, mercurial shows becoming "a laboratory" in their own right. 2023 brought two creative residencies; where eight new pieces were sketched out. In July of that year the "aural puzzle" was recorded by Vincent Poujol at the Gam studio in the Belgian Ardennes. In contrast to what went before, there were no plans to rely on live recording, and overdubs were used extensively. Even so, the tracks were still very fresh, sometimes even non-existent: the track "Tanvusse" began in the studio as a sample first heard in Niger. Other tracks like "Lago" were brought to rehearsal as thoughtforms in the singer Kaito Winse's head. Later, Benjamin Chaval assembled, arranged and further produced a body of work "that had to be tamed and reinvented" in concert. First impressions are driven by the different fusions thrown up between polyrhythms and polyphony: a notion of the constant reassembling of various musical building blocks. The opener "Borgo" has a dissonant tone to it. Two minutes in and it's by no means certain who will win out in this musical tug of war between voice, beat and instruments. All elements seem to burn themselves out eventually, living off the warmth of the energy created by their fight in a long meditative tail out. The tracks on the album are informed by Kaito Winse's voice and his use of a traditional flute and mouth bow. All three elements work, sometimes in tandem, as wider ciphers for communication, or "emotive" forms of mystification that inspire and unsettle. Throughout, Winse demonstrates what untapped powers listeners command, bodily; if only they knew how to use them. Alongside Winse, Nico Gitto (guitar) and Benjamin Chaval (drums, synths and electronics) work like mechanics, adding and updating elements to suit.
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CD
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GB 150CD
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Sahrawi singer-songwriter activist Aziza Brahim's fifth album Mawja ("wave" in Hassaniya Arabic) is fashioned from a simple but powerful foundational palette: Saharan and Iberian percussion entwining with stately guitars and warm, enveloping bass. Co-produced by Brahim with long-time collaborator Guillem Aguilar, the record from her oeuvre that Mawja most sonically resembles is her revered and graceful debut Soutak (GB 009LP, 2014). That noted, there is a confident eclecticism found here, an expansive take on her vision that even includes a drum pattern inspired by the Clash. Brahim's voice, as always, is a wellspring of deep and resonant emotions. The yearning for homeland. The struggle for freedom. The love for one's elders. The unfurling of time. Waves of history, waves of sound. Mawja.
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GB 144CD
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Saramaccan Sound (Suriname) are a brother duo -- Dwight Sampie and Robert Jabini -- who write and perform flowing acoustic songs sung in Saramaccan, the language from the Americas with the most African elements. Their debut album was recorded in situ by Grammy winner Ian Brennan (Parchman Prison Prayer, Ustad Saami, The Good Ones) along a remote riverside in the Amazon region of Suriname. The lyrics are topical and reference everyday strife such as the rising tides and floods in the area due to global warming. Their bone raw songs and performances evoke heart-worn longing, a deep sense of place and a strange familiarity. As if Merle Haggard had been raised in the Amazon rather than Bakersfield. Where the River Bends Is Only the Beginning is the 12th release in Glitterbeat's acclaimed Hidden Musics series.
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GB 146CD
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São Paulo's Afro-Brazilian groove visionaries Bixiga 70 return with an ecstatic fifth album -- Vapor -- their first in four years. The sound is joyful, a series of potent horn driven melodies and infectious polyrhythms. More than a return, Vapor is a rebirth. An exuberant, full-tilt party. Featuring Simone Sou.
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GB 147LP
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LP version. YĪN YĪN, the highly touted Dutch quartet from Maastricht, returns with a sonically expansive third album Mount Matsu. Recorded collectively in their own studio in the Belgian countryside, the album is a kaleidoscope of sounds and influences, occupying a no man's land between Khruangbin and Kraftwerk, surf music, and Southeast Asian psychedelia, Stax soul, and mutant '80s disco, city pop, and Japanese instrumental folk (sōkyoku). Mount Matsu sees YĪN YĪN at their most mature and adventurous stage yet. Off-kilter disco tunes with a trans-local character, neo-Thai psych funk jams and folk-styled soul ballads remain central to their sonic identity, and the influx of fresh ideas results in an even more eclectic and effervescent sound image. Mount Matsu marks a step back from the occasionally more Moroder-esque, rhythm-machine and synth-heavy production style of YĪN YĪN. This is encapsulated in the analogue warmth of their valve amp guitar sounds, vintage synth lines and acoustic percussion timbres, evoking the buzz of being in the rehearsal space with the band. Infectious pentatonic melodicism calling for multiple rewinds!
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GB 147CD
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YĪN YĪN, the highly touted Dutch quartet from Maastricht, returns with a sonically expansive third album Mount Matsu. Recorded collectively in their own studio in the Belgian countryside, the album is a kaleidoscope of sounds and influences, occupying a no man's land between Khruangbin and Kraftwerk, surf music, and Southeast Asian psychedelia, Stax soul, and mutant '80s disco, city pop, and Japanese instrumental folk (sōkyoku). Mount Matsu sees YĪN YĪN at their most mature and adventurous stage yet. Off-kilter disco tunes with a trans-local character, neo-Thai psych funk jams and folk-styled soul ballads remain central to their sonic identity, and the influx of fresh ideas results in an even more eclectic and effervescent sound image. Mount Matsu marks a step back from the occasionally more Moroder-esque, rhythm-machine and synth-heavy production style of YĪN YĪN. This is encapsulated in the analogue warmth of their valve amp guitar sounds, vintage synth lines and acoustic percussion timbres, evoking the buzz of being in the rehearsal space with the band. Infectious pentatonic melodicism calling for multiple rewinds!
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LP
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GB 146LP
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LP version. São Paulo's Afro-Brazilian groove visionaries Bixiga 70 return with an ecstatic fifth album -- Vapor -- their first in four years. The sound is joyful, a series of potent horn driven melodies and infectious polyrhythms. More than a return, Vapor is a rebirth. An exuberant, full-tilt party. Featuring Simone Sou.
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GB 143CD
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Haunting in situ recordings from Parchman Farm maximum security prison in Mississippi. Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan (Tinariwen, Ustad Saami, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Zomba Prison Project) recorded the prison's Sunday gospel service and the results are unforgettable. The performances range from solo acapella to a floor-shaking electric band. The repertoire includes both traditional and newly penned spirituals. Some Mississippi Sunday Morning is an unfiltered and deeply resonant journey into a musical world rarely seen or heard. The notorious Parchman Prison has a rich musical history with Son House, Bukka White, Mose Allison, and Elvis Presley's father Vernon Presley having been former residents. Mississippi's oldest penitentiary, Parchman was founded in 1901 and has one of the highest prisoner mortality rates in the nation as well as experiencing ongoing riots. Due to restrictions on video and photos, the only artifact from this meeting are the sounds -- making the voices all the more ethereal and ghostly. One man's voice was so deep, it sounded like the Mississippi River singing -- as if Barry White were a soprano. Another freestyled a rap about the shame he feels for having caused pain to his mother and others due to his actions. Another was a 73-year-old, former "rock and roll" singer who'd survived prison, become a chaplain, and found God. A veil of sadness seemed to shroud. The singers' voices softened and textured by the inescapable regret that their environment confronts them with. Most songs were covers of Gospel standards, but delivered so imbued with subtext that they were transformed almost unrecognizably from the source material. One of the beauties of the experience was that it was a successful integration of white and black inmates, whose services are often held separately due to racial tensions. As the men beamed, hugged and hi-fived one another in celebration, Chaplain Sidney beamed, "The making of this record has brought much needed encouragement and hope to the men here at Parchman." These were voices unchained, if only for those few hours. Expressing a vocal breadth of freedom otherwise denied and restrained. Recorded 100% live without overdubs at Parchman maximum security prison's Sunday morning service.
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GB 145LP
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LP version. Vladimir Lenhart will happily drop Ethno-Noise on you, then leave you to work out what that might mean. You'll have a pretty good idea after about a minute of this record -- or indeed if you've spent any time in the Balkans generally, surrounded by folk music in all its incarnations, and in Belgrade specifically, which yields up the ghosts of the Yugoslav punk and industrial scenes of the 1980s and the city's current experimental excursions to anyone with time to listen and explore. The interrogation of folk and the national songbook has gained considerable currency in the last several years (think Damir Imamović in Bosnia, Richard Dawson in the UK or labelmates Altın Gün), but Lenhart Tapes are taking a slightly different path. Vladimir Lenhart is only one half of the story here, however. Enter Tijana Stanković: singer, classically trained violinist, ethnomusicologist and Radio Belgrade music editor. By Vladimir's own admission, her encyclopedic knowledge of the music he had grown up with turned the project from something somewhat ironic to something very sincere. He recalls an immediate connection, over a shared love of that music, and it's a connection that has since developed in perhaps unforeseen directions, with Tijana herself pushing Vladimir into an even more uncompromising sonic stance. The slow burn of Lenhart Tapes' emergence has been built upon a set of scorching small-venue performances, with Vladimir's Walkmans laying down a collage of beat, noise and tune for Tijana's voice and violin to respond to and, at times, work against. A decade of sporadic releases, frequently on cassette, was followed by 2021's Duets. Now comes Dens, which hits a different kind of stride. The loops and samples of the previous record are still there, but are joined by an expanded roster of musicians and bolstered by the return of Tijana after a musical sojourn in Budapest. It's denser, more considered, but still spacious. There's a lot going on in this record, and you'll want time (and your biggest ears) to catch it all. Expertly produced and mastered, with superb vocal presence courtesy of Tijana Stanković, Zoja Borovčanin and Svetlana Spajić, it's an endlessly fascinating analogue journey that rewards repeated and close listening.
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GB 149LP
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LP version. Lucidvox's new album is vast-sounding. A collection of swirling ritual missives offered up in the hope of better times. Formerly based in Russia, for their new album That's What Remained, the all-female quartet has added additional sonic thrust (horns, keyboards, strings, atmospheric textures) to their already acclaimed and impassioned psych-rock. Here, style reveals the soul. That's What Remained cannot be anything other than a Lucidvox record -- that firebird quality they always had, the busy rhythms and spitting guitar runs, are still there. But it's a work with a considerable presence; much more so than their debut, We Are. When formulating this record they turned outwards, and asked trumpeter Timur Mizinov from Wooden Whales, violinist Dasha Avramova, guitarist Dmitry Chesnov and multi-instrumentalist Ella Bayisbaeva as a back vocalist to contribute; alongside a children's choir. Artfully and collectively constructed to convey their message, nothing here is wasted or done for the hell of it; but the band clearly hope that their new style can change their own narrative. Each track's DNA tries to persuade the listener that Lucidvox see this record as a launchpad for other iterations of themselves. Plotted and rehearsed a handful of times before the band left Moscow, and built online over a year, the swapped files and code of this album became the smaller particles of the (human) whole. The pathways these files negotiated also ran parallel to those trodden by the band members.
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GB 145CD
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Vladimir Lenhart will happily drop Ethno-Noise on you, then leave you to work out what that might mean. You'll have a pretty good idea after about a minute of this record -- or indeed if you've spent any time in the Balkans generally, surrounded by folk music in all its incarnations, and in Belgrade specifically, which yields up the ghosts of the Yugoslav punk and industrial scenes of the 1980s and the city's current experimental excursions to anyone with time to listen and explore. The interrogation of folk and the national songbook has gained considerable currency in the last several years (think Damir Imamović in Bosnia, Richard Dawson in the UK or labelmates Altın Gün), but Lenhart Tapes are taking a slightly different path. Vladimir Lenhart is only one half of the story here, however. Enter Tijana Stanković: singer, classically trained violinist, ethnomusicologist and Radio Belgrade music editor. By Vladimir's own admission, her encyclopedic knowledge of the music he had grown up with turned the project from something somewhat ironic to something very sincere. He recalls an immediate connection, over a shared love of that music, and it's a connection that has since developed in perhaps unforeseen directions, with Tijana herself pushing Vladimir into an even more uncompromising sonic stance. The slow burn of Lenhart Tapes' emergence has been built upon a set of scorching small-venue performances, with Vladimir's Walkmans laying down a collage of beat, noise and tune for Tijana's voice and violin to respond to and, at times, work against. A decade of sporadic releases, frequently on cassette, was followed by 2021's Duets. Now comes Dens, which hits a different kind of stride. The loops and samples of the previous record are still there, but are joined by an expanded roster of musicians and bolstered by the return of Tijana after a musical sojourn in Budapest. It's denser, more considered, but still spacious. There's a lot going on in this record, and you'll want time (and your biggest ears) to catch it all. Expertly produced and mastered, with superb vocal presence courtesy of Tijana Stanković, Zoja Borovčanin and Svetlana Spajić, it's an endlessly fascinating analogue journey that rewards repeated and close listening.
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GB 143LP
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LP version. Haunting in situ recordings from Parchman Farm maximum security prison in Mississippi. Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan (Tinariwen, Ustad Saami, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Zomba Prison Project) recorded the prison's Sunday gospel service and the results are unforgettable. The performances range from solo acapella to a floor-shaking electric band. The repertoire includes both traditional and newly penned spirituals. Some Mississippi Sunday Morning is an unfiltered and deeply resonant journey into a musical world rarely seen or heard. The notorious Parchman Prison has a rich musical history with Son House, Bukka White, Mose Allison, and Elvis Presley's father Vernon Presley having been former residents. Mississippi's oldest penitentiary, Parchman was founded in 1901 and has one of the highest prisoner mortality rates in the nation as well as experiencing ongoing riots. Due to restrictions on video and photos, the only artifact from this meeting are the sounds -- making the voices all the more ethereal and ghostly. One man's voice was so deep, it sounded like the Mississippi River singing -- as if Barry White were a soprano. Another freestyled a rap about the shame he feels for having caused pain to his mother and others due to his actions. Another was a 73-year-old, former "rock and roll" singer who'd survived prison, become a chaplain, and found God. A veil of sadness seemed to shroud. The singers' voices softened and textured by the inescapable regret that their environment confronts them with. Most songs were covers of Gospel standards, but delivered so imbued with subtext that they were transformed almost unrecognizably from the source material. One of the beauties of the experience was that it was a successful integration of white and black inmates, whose services are often held separately due to racial tensions. As the men beamed, hugged and hi-fived one another in celebration, Chaplain Sidney beamed, "The making of this record has brought much needed encouragement and hope to the men here at Parchman." These were voices unchained, if only for those few hours. Expressing a vocal breadth of freedom otherwise denied and restrained. Recorded 100% live without overdubs at Parchman maximum security prison's Sunday morning service.
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GB 149CD
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Lucidvox's new album is vast-sounding. A collection of swirling ritual missives offered up in the hope of better times. Formerly based in Russia, for their new album That's What Remained, the all-female quartet has added additional sonic thrust (horns, keyboards, strings, atmospheric textures) to their already acclaimed and impassioned psych-rock. Here, style reveals the soul. That's What Remained cannot be anything other than a Lucidvox record -- that firebird quality they always had, the busy rhythms and spitting guitar runs, are still there. But it's a work with a considerable presence; much more so than their debut, We Are. When formulating this record they turned outwards, and asked trumpeter Timur Mizinov from Wooden Whales, violinist Dasha Avramova, guitarist Dmitry Chesnov and multi-instrumentalist Ella Bayisbaeva as a back vocalist to contribute; alongside a children's choir. Artfully and collectively constructed to convey their message, nothing here is wasted or done for the hell of it; but the band clearly hope that their new style can change their own narrative. Each track's DNA tries to persuade the listener that Lucidvox see this record as a launchpad for other iterations of themselves. Plotted and rehearsed a handful of times before the band left Moscow, and built online over a year, the swapped files and code of this album became the smaller particles of the (human) whole. The pathways these files negotiated also ran parallel to those trodden by the band members.
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GB 141LP
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LP version. A genre-defying Afrofuturist manifesto from Uganda. Producer, dancer, and choreographer Faizal Mostrixx's singular vision of East African electronic music is a lush sonic tapestry of polyrhythms, modern dancefloor styles, amapiano, Nile Basin ceremonial chants and Pan-African field recordings. A stalwart of the explosive Kampala electronic music scene, Mostrixx has collaborated with the Nyege Nyege collective appearing at both the African and European editions of their festival. Mutations is Faizal's second full-length album, following close on the heels of his acclaimed EP Transitions (2022). Mostrixx is first and foremost a dancer, but one who has found time to absorb a full range of global electronic music styles along the way, after a solid grounding in older sounds. Musically, his expression builds first on a Ugandan heritage, particularly its varied rhythmic patterns and the specific style of music played at the kadodi, an ancient circumcision ceremony. These antique local rhythm patterns are balanced with influences from further afield: downtempo, deep, and Afro House elements melded with sub-heavy dub, footwork and amapiano, East and South African polyrhythms, modern urban styles, and age-old chants from the Nile Basin. Horizons are further expanded with field recordings from Uganda, Congo, Ethiopia, and Tanzania, some by Mostrixx and others, from the 1950s, taken from the International Library of African Music. They are intricately interwoven into the sonic fabric of the record. This cultural Pan-Africanism should not obscure the fact that Faizal Mostrixx is very much an artist who traces a trajectory of his own, one that transcends the bedroom-producer ethos and dancefloor-ready functionalism of much contemporary cutting-edge electronic music. Mutations is above all a piece of work that feeds on the creative friction between different musical forms spanning various African regions and histories, but with the artist's own character and interests very much out front. The record features Lesothian artist Morena Leraba in imperious form on "Loosely", chants by the influential Ugandan singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Giovanni Kiyingi, and a restless exploration of rhythm and tempo throughout, whether on dancefloor bangers like "Tunes of the Jungle" and "Back to Tanzania" or the more downbeat "Afro Aliens". "Onions and Love", the opening track, is built around a beautiful acapella by Kebenesh, a lady who chops onions at the restaurant of the Alliance Ethio-Française in Addis Ababa, whom Mostrixx recorded in an impromptu studio. What he manages to do to superb effect throughout, in a series of mostly four-minute tracks, is push outwards to create a sense of epic yet still intimate space -- further proof of the fruitful feedback loop of choreography and music that makes this record so enjoyable.
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GB 141CD
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A genre-defying Afrofuturist manifesto from Uganda. Producer, dancer, and choreographer Faizal Mostrixx's singular vision of East African electronic music is a lush sonic tapestry of polyrhythms, modern dancefloor styles, amapiano, Nile Basin ceremonial chants and Pan-African field recordings. A stalwart of the explosive Kampala electronic music scene, Mostrixx has collaborated with the Nyege Nyege collective appearing at both the African and European editions of their festival. Mutations is Faizal's second full-length album, following close on the heels of his acclaimed EP Transitions (2022). Mostrixx is first and foremost a dancer, but one who has found time to absorb a full range of global electronic music styles along the way, after a solid grounding in older sounds. Musically, his expression builds first on a Ugandan heritage, particularly its varied rhythmic patterns and the specific style of music played at the kadodi, an ancient circumcision ceremony. These antique local rhythm patterns are balanced with influences from further afield: downtempo, deep, and Afro House elements melded with sub-heavy dub, footwork and amapiano, East and South African polyrhythms, modern urban styles, and age-old chants from the Nile Basin. Horizons are further expanded with field recordings from Uganda, Congo, Ethiopia, and Tanzania, some by Mostrixx and others, from the 1950s, taken from the International Library of African Music. They are intricately interwoven into the sonic fabric of the record. This cultural Pan-Africanism should not obscure the fact that Faizal Mostrixx is very much an artist who traces a trajectory of his own, one that transcends the bedroom-producer ethos and dancefloor-ready functionalism of much contemporary cutting-edge electronic music. Mutations is above all a piece of work that feeds on the creative friction between different musical forms spanning various African regions and histories, but with the artist's own character and interests very much out front. The record features Lesothian artist Morena Leraba in imperious form on "Loosely", chants by the influential Ugandan singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Giovanni Kiyingi, and a restless exploration of rhythm and tempo throughout, whether on dancefloor bangers like "Tunes of the Jungle" and "Back to Tanzania" or the more downbeat "Afro Aliens". "Onions and Love", the opening track, is built around a beautiful acapella by Kebenesh, a lady who chops onions at the restaurant of the Alliance Ethio-Française in Addis Ababa, whom Mostrixx recorded in an impromptu studio. What he manages to do to superb effect throughout, in a series of mostly four-minute tracks, is push outwards to create a sense of epic yet still intimate space -- further proof of the fruitful feedback loop of choreography and music that makes this record so enjoyable.
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GB 140CD
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Mesmerizing field recordings from Botswana. Producer/recordist/Grammy winner Ian Brennan ventured to an end-of-the-road location to document songs sung in Taa, a rich language on the verge of extinction. This captivating music is created by solo and layered voices, handclaps, found percussion and thumb piano. Shamanic, ghostly ballads from the farthest reaches of Southern Africa. Volume #11 of Glitterbeat's acclaimed Hidden Musics series. The Taa language in Botswana possesses 112 sounds, the most of any language in the world. In contrast, English has approximately 44 sounds, Italian 32. But there are only around 2,500 Taa speakers remaining and the language is "dying." The songs on this album are mostly mantras... prayers that repeat the same words or phrases over and over again. The song titles tell entire stories by themselves, and with the Taa language's heavy use of click consonants, the sounds carry the meaning as much as the words. The name of the Taa language itself translates to "human being," making its threat of extinction all the more poignant --the language living in the people, not on the page. The explanation of lyrics often took longer than the songs themselves -- difficult to translate, complex thoughts encapsulated in a single word.
"Botswana is diamond-drunk nation, hosting the biggest diamond mine on earth. But the Taa villages at the furthest reach of dead-end dirt roads are where the country expires and the people are left forgotten by unguarded borders. One village's name literally translates to "the very end." Wherever we reached, elderly shamans -- two who were blind -- gathered and played ghostly ballads. Yet, they told us that there were many other songs and those could not be played since performing them in the daytime would bring bad luck. One shaman's son said he hadn't heard the music performed since he was a child in the 1980s, over thirty years ago. Many were 'homemade-beer, drinking songs.' Another shaman's parents taught him to play the thumb piano as a way of remembering them after they were gone Botswana is so flat, at sunset you can see the earth's own shadow -- the horizon bending back on itself. We visited the highest point in the country, a hill that would barely register as one elsewhere. It is a land largely defined by absence. The towns resembled trailer-parks in America's southwest..." --Notes written by Ian Brennan
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GB 134LP
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LP version. Work Hard solidifies King Ayisoba's reputation as both a shamanic performer and a restless sonic experimenter. The album is a wild mashup of Ayisoba's frenetic Kologo sound and musical deep dives from an exciting roster of Ghanaian producers and contributors. Curated and partially mixed by Zea, from post-punk legends The Ex. Work Hard has a different focus than Ayisoba's previous releases. This was partly due to the disruptions and adjustments that Covid brought in its wake, which in turn necessitated a more homegrown strategy. The bulk of the recording and mixing was done at Top Link, Francis Ayamga's hilltop studio in Bongo, a town in the Upper East Region of Ghana bordering Burkina Faso. Francis has become an in-demand producer, due mainly to his previous work with Ayisoba, a relationship that also packed in a European tour as part of the King's band, playing the djembe and bembe drums. Francis has thrown himself into curating as much of the local music scene as possible, producing This is FraFra Power (2019), released on Makkum Records, the label of key Ayisoba collaborator and main international "presence" on Work Hard, Zea, aka Arnold de Boer. De Boer, who mixed two tracks and did the mastering (as well as adding vocals and guitar parts), talked of how some of the "Glocal" sounds on King Ayisoba's new record initially came to pass. The record's core playfulness, brilliantly captured by Ayamga, could be a spirit conjured up whilst playing live back in 2019, when Zea and Oscar Jan Hoogland toured with King Ayisoba, Ayuune Sule, Atamina, Prince Buju, and others. Tracks are often adorned with digital candy courtesy of Fruity Loops and Cubase, two programs that often inform the sound of contemporary African pop. Unlike his previous album, 2017's 1000 Can Die, Work Hard showcases no guest musicians, but De Boer sees the local involvement creating a practice akin to that nurtured at the Black Ark studios, both in terms of vibe and operation. As noted earlier, Zea throws a rope bridge to another creative hub with its roots firmly planted in the local community, Katzwijn Studios in Voorhout. For Work Hard, Ayisoba recorded one mid-tour track in this magical converted old bulb shed, the glorious "People Talk Too Much". Despite having a foot in two continents, the album is perhaps Ayisoba's most consistent, "concentrated" release. The sleeve notes and lyrics, in Frafra, Twi, or the King's own style of pidgin English, are strident and sometimes mischievous statements, dealing with uncomfortable issues many often prefer to ignore in an increasingly cloistered West.
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