Let’s start off with a little noise; well, actually, a lot of noise in the form of “Demagogues and Charlatans on the Lash” by WeaklingChild. If that album title isn’t enough of a hint about the general theme, the cover is a manipulated and uglied-up photo of US President “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” But there’s some comment here for politics on both sides of the pond (see opening one-two punch “Stable Genius” and “Brexit Means Brexit”).
The first three tracks are pure noise, including some underlying manipulated vocal samples. Then a surprise: “BoJob” starts off with an almost bucolic sound – is that birds chirping? You will realize it was not as the track evolves with its speeding tape sound manipulation. “Lament for Damo” follows in a similar vein, but this one sounds to me mostly like nap time at the zoo among the big cats. But just as you may be lulled into a more peaceful frame of mind, the last two tracks bring back the noise to bookend this release, including sped up tapes of vocals where I think I may even hear President Voldemort on part of “Strong and Stable Leadership.”
Playing this loud will help drown out all the bad “outside noise” and you may even find it cathartic if you’re carrying around negative feelings about the current state of things.
Next up is “Let’s Break Things” by The Blank Holidays released by the Strategic Tape Reserve label (so, as you might guess from the label name, you can get this on cassette too). On the other hand, although you might not guess it from listening to the title track which is a bit more experimental, overall I would describe this music as lo-fi (mostly) acoustic guitar led songs with complementary instruments, elements of noise, and production manipulation to keep things interesting. It’s a great mix of lovely and weird sounds. It also sounds like the unnamed person behind The Blank Holidays had a lot of fun making all this music, and that comes through.
There are a couple stand outs for me. “No, These Are the Notes” has a title line repeated as it, along with simple picked guitar, gets more distorted as it goes along. Later, “Major Blues” travels from fairly straightforward guitar, including what sounds like bowed bass embellishment, to more distorted and aggressive as it moves along, before resolving to a calm end.
Last up for this installment of Twitter Feeds is “Contra/Fact” by the Matthew Lux’s Communication Arts Quartet released by Astral Spirits. This is, at its heart, a jazz album, but with lots of less traditional electronic and production touches mixed in. You can pick out many possible influences (Dolphy, Davis, Threadgill, Sun Ra, and Eno, to name a few), but it’s not derivative by a long shot; this is original sound with lots of interesting elements that rewards repeated listens.
Opener “Camisa Sete” pulled me in immediately, driven by its funky drumming. A couple later standouts for me are “Paw Paw,” which sounds a bit like Albert Ayler being produced by space aliens, and “C.G.L.W,” a song that starts out with some strong but disjointed percussion and evolves into a relaxed free jazz collage (a bit à la John Cage) that takes its time to unfold. But really you can’t go wrong with any of the music here; it’s all great stuff.
And a special shout out to the Astral Spirits label. Not only do they make lots of wonderful music available, but I really like the aesthetic of their album art for most of their releases over the last year. They have their own unique but consistent style with sort of a retro vibe to them. Well done.